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Title: Seeds of Life
Author: Taine, John [Bell, Eric Temple] (1883-1960)
Date of first publication: 1951 [this edition]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
New York: Galaxy Publishing Corp., [1951]
[Galaxy Science Fiction Novel No. 13]
Date first posted: 14 December 2017
Date last updated: 14 December 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1489
This ebook was produced by Al Haines
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.
As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout,
and have added a table of contents.
SEEDS OF LIFE
By
John Taine
A Classic of Science Fiction--
Fast-Moving and Thought-Provoking
A Complete Science Fiction Novel
GALAXY PUBLISHING CORP.
421 Hudson Street
New York 14, N.Y.
GALAXY _Science Fiction_ Novels, selected by the editors of
GALAXY _Science Fiction_ Magazine, are the choice of science
fiction novels both original and reprint.
GALAXY _Science Fiction_ Novel No. 13
35c a copy. Subscription: Six Novels $2.00
The characters, the location, and the incidents in this book are
entirely the product of the author's imagination and have no
relation to any person or event in real life.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_by_
THE GUINN COMPANY, INC.
NEW YORK 14, N.Y.
CONTENTS
1. The Black Widow
2. The Boiling Box
3. Reborn
4. The Widow's Revenge
5. His Joke
6. Discharged
7. Warned
8. Trapped
9. Bertha's Brood
10. Cat and Mouse
11. The Toad
12. His Son
13. His Last Will and Testament
Chapter One--_THE BLACK WIDOW_
"DANGER. KEEP OUT." This curt warning in scarlet on the bright green
steel door of the twenty million volt electric laboratory was intended
for the curious public, not for the intrepid researchers, should one of
the latter carelessly forget to lock the door after him.
The laboratory itself, a severe box of reinforced concrete, might have
been mistaken by the casual visitor as a modern factory but for the
fact that it had no windows. This was no mere whim of the erratic
architect; certain experiments must be carried out by their own light
or in the dim glow of carefully filtered illumination from artificial
sources. The absence of windows gave the massive rectangular block a
singularly forbidding aspect. An imaginative artist might have said
the laboratory had a sinister appearance, and only a scientist would
have contradicted him. To the daring workers who tamed the man-made
lightnings in it, the twenty million volt laboratory was more beautiful
than the Parthenon in its prime.
Of the thousands who passed the laboratory daily on their way to or
from work in the city of Seattle, perhaps a scant half dozen gave it so
much as a passing glance. It was just another building, as barren of
romance as a shoe factory. The charm of the Erickson Foundation for
Electrical Research was not visible to a casual inspection.
Nevertheless, its fascination was a vivid fact to the eighty men who
slaved in its laboratories twelve or eighteen hours a day, regardless
of all time clocks or other devices to coerce the unwilling to earn
their wages. Their one trial was the fussy Director of the Foundation;
work was a delight.
About three o'clock of a brilliant May afternoon, Andrew Crane and his
technical assistant, the stocky Neils Bork, gingerly approached the
forbidding door, carrying the last unit of Crane's latest invention.
This was a massive cylinder of Jena glass, six feet long by three in
diameter, open at one end and sealed at the other by an enormous metal
cathode like a giant's helmet. It had cost the pair four months of
unremitting labor and heart-breaking setbacks to perfect this
evil-looking crown to Crane's masterpiece. Therefore, they proceeded
cautiously, firmly planting both feet on one granite step before
venturing to fumble for the next.
Their final tussle in the workshops of the Foundation had endured
nineteen hours. The job of sealing the cathode to the glass had to be
done at one spurt, or not at all. During all that grueling grind
neither man had dared to turn aside from the blowpipe for a second. In
the nervous tension of succeeding at last, they had not felt the lack
of food, water, or sleep. They had failed too often already, each time
with the prize but a few hours ahead of them, to lose it again for a
cup of water.
Crane planted his right foot firmly on the last, broad step. His left
followed. He was up, his arms trembling from exhaustion. Bork
cautiously felt for the top step. Then abused nature took her sardonic
revenge for nineteen hours' flouting of her rights. The groping foot
failed to clear the granite by a quarter of an inch. In a fraction of
a second, four months' agonizing labor was as if it had never been.
Crane was a tall, lean Texan, of about twenty-seven, desiccated, with a
long, cadaverous face and a constant dry grin about his mouth. He
shunned unnecessary speech, except when a tube or valve suddenly burnt
itself out owing to some oversight of his own. When Bork blundered,
Crane as a rule held his tongue. But he grinned. Bork wished at such
awkward moments that the lank Texan would at least swear. He never
did; he merely smiled. Neils Bork was a true Nordic type, blue-eyed,
yellow-haired, stockily built. From his physical appearance he should
have been a steady, self-reliant technician. Unfortunately he was not
as reliable as he might have been, had he given himself half a chance.
Viewing the shattered glass and the elaborate cathode, which had
skipped merrily down the granite steps, and was now lying like a
capsized turtle on its cracked back thirty feet away in the middle of
the cement sidewalk, Crane grinned. Bork tried not to look at his
companion's face. He failed.
"I couldn't help it," he blurted out.
It was a foolish thing to have said. Of course he couldn't 'help
it'--now. Only an imbecile would have deliberately smashed an
intricate piece of apparatus that had taken months of sweating toil to
perfect. Bork's indiscretion loosened Crane's reluctant tongue.
"You could help it," he snapped, "if you'd let the booze alone. Look
at me! I'm as steady as a rock. You're shaking all over. Cut it out
after this, or I'll cut you out."
"I haven't touched a drop for--" the wretched Bork began in
self-defense, but Crane cut him short.
"Twenty hours! I smelt your breath when you came to work yesterday
morning. Of course you can't control your legs when you're half-stewed
all the time."
"It was working all night that made me trip. If you had let me take a
layoff after we finished, as I asked, instead of carrying it over at
once, I wouldn't--"
"All right. Keep your shirt on. Sorry I rode you. Well," Crane
continued with a sour grin, "we shall have to do it again. That's all.
I'm going to take a look around before I go to bed. Let's see if the
baby can still kick."
Bork stood silent while Crane unlocked the steel door.
"Coming?" Crane called, as he switched on the lights.
Bork followed, locked the door, and stood sullenly beside his chief on
the narrow steel gallery overlooking the vast pit of the huge
transformers. Forty of these towering giants, gray and evil as the
smokestacks of an old time battleship, loomed up menacingly in the
glaring light. Each stood firmly planted on its towering tripod--three
twenty-foot rigid legs made up of huge mushroom insulators, like a
living but immobile enemy from another planet. The whole battery of
the forty devils presented a strangely half human aspect, and their
massed company conveyed a sinister threat, as of seething whirlwinds of
energy stored up against the men who had rashly created these hostile
fiends. The two men, staring down on the half-tamed genii, felt
something of this menace, although both were practical and one was
daring almost to a fault. But in their present exhaustion, nature
succeeded in making herself felt, if not heard, on a deeper, more
intuitive level of their consciousness.
"Let's try out the two million volt baby," Crane proposed as a peace
offering to the still surly Bork. "We haven't busted that, yet," he
continued rather tactlessly.
The 'two million volt' to which Crane referred was his first attempt to
build a more powerful X-ray tube than any then in existence. By
studying this two million volt baby minutely, Crane hoped to succeed
with the full grown twenty million volt tube which he and Bork were
constructing. Then, if theory for once should prove a trustworthy
guide to the riddle of matter, they hoped to smash up the atoms of at
least half a dozen of the elements. What might happen thereafter Crane
refused to predict.
"Step it up two hundred and fifty thousand at a time," he ordered Bork,
"and be careful. We don't want to blow out the tube."
Neils Bork shot him a resentful glance as if his bruised conscience
accused him of being a hopeless bungler. Nothing was farther from
Crane's mind. He was merely repeating the routine instructions of the
laboratory. To prevent possibly fatal mishaps, the experimenters
invariably followed a rigid set of rules in their work, testing every
switch and piece of apparatus in a definite order before touching
anything, although they 'knew' that everything was safe.
Bork threw in the first switch and turned off the lights, plunging the
laboratory into total darkness. There was a metallic clang, and the
black air began to vibrate ominously with a rapid, surging hiss. A
sombre eye of cherry red stole out on the darkness as two hundred and
fifty thousand volts flashed to the cathode of the X-ray tube; then,
almost instantly, the red flashed up to a dazzling white spot.
"All right," Crane ordered, "throw in the next."
Under half a million volts the twelve foot tube flickered and burned
with a fitful green fluorescence, revealing the eight metal
'doughnuts,' like huge balloon tires, encircling the glass. These
constituted the practical detail which balanced the terrific forces
within the tube and prevented the glass from collapsing.
The outcome of any particular 'run' was always somewhat of a sporting
venture. Until the shot was safely over, it was stupid to bet that the
tube would not collapse or burn out. Crane waited a full two minutes
before ordering the step up to seven hundred and fifty thousand volts.
Under the increased pressure the surging dry hiss leapt up, shriller
and angrier, and deep violet coronas of electricity bristled out,
crackling evilly, in unexpected spots of the darkness.
Bork began to grow restless.
"Hadn't we better step it up to a million now, and quit?"
Crane laughed his dry laugh. "Getting nervous about what Dr. Brown
told us?"
Bork grunted, and Crane, in his cocksure ignorance, elucidated. "All
doctors are old women. What do the physiologists actually know about
the effect of X-rays as hard as ours on human tissues? I've spent at
least thirty hours the past eight months working around that tube going
at capacity--two million volts--and there isn't a blister or a burn
anywhere on my body. I'll bet these rays are so hard they go straight
through flesh, bone and marrow like sunlight through a soap bubble.
What are you afraid of? If our bodies are so transparent to these hard
rays that they stop none of the vibrations, I fail to see how the
biggest cells in us are in any danger whatever. You've got to stop
hard radiations, or at least damp them down, before they can do human
bone, nerves or muscles any harm. All the early workers used soft
rays. That's why they lost their eyesight, fingers, hands, arms, legs,
and their lives."
"It takes months or even years, for the bad burns to show up," Bork
objected.
"Well," Crane retorted, "if there is anything in what Dr. Brown said, I
should be a pretty ugly leper right now. Use your eyes. My skin's
smooth as a baby's."
"He said you will be sterilized for life," Bork muttered. "The same
for me. I'm not going to live the next twenty years like a rotten
half-man."
"Be a confirmed bachelor like me," Crane laughed, "and you'll never
miss the difference. What's a family anyway but a lot of grief? Throw
in the next switch and forget the girl."
Under the million volts, the glowing tube buzzed like a swarm of
enraged hornets, and for the first time in all his months of work in
the laboratory, Crane felt a peculiar dry itching over his whole body.
As Bork stepped the voltage up to the full two million, the itching
increased.
"Imagination," he muttered, refusing to heed nature's plain hint.
"Hand me the fluoroscope, will you?"
Bork groped over the bench beneath the switches and failed, in the
dark, to find what he sought.
"I'll have to turn on the lights."
"Very well. Make it snappy. I need my lunch and a nap. So do you."
Rather than admit that Bork's fears might not be wholly old-womanish,
Crane would stick out his discomfort and delude his assistant into a
false feeling of security by feigning an interest in the hardness of
the rays.
Bork turned on the floodlights. Just as he was about to pick up the
fluoroscope, he started back with an involuntary exclamation of disgust.
"Short circuit?" Crane snapped. "I'll pull the switches."
In two seconds the coronas were extinct, a succession of metallic
clanks shot rapidly to silence, and the cathode of the two million volt
tube dimmed to a luminous blood red. The tingling itch, however, on
every inch of Crane's skin persisted. Bork for the moment was
apparently beyond speech. In the glaring light his face had a greenish
hue, as if he were about to be violently seasick.
"Short circuit?" Crane repeated.
"No," Bork gasped. "Black widow."
Crane failed to conceal his contempt. "Afraid of a spider! Why didn't
you smash it?"
"It dropped off the bench and fell behind those boards."
"Rot! You're seeing things. It'll be snakes next. There have been no
black widows found nearer than Magnolia Bluffs or Bainbridge
Island--ten miles from here."
Crane's indifferent sarcasm stung Bork to cold fury.
"Snakes? Then lift that board."
Without a word, Crane bent down and contemptuously tossed the top board
aside. "There's nothing here," he remarked dryly, turning the next
board. In his zeal to discomfort Bork he deliberately thrust his hand
into the narrow space between the pile of boards and the wall, sweeping
it methodically back and forth to dislodge the supposedly imaginary
enemy. The sweat started out on Bork's forehead. Death by the bite of
an aggressively venomous spider is likely to be unpleasant even to
witness.
"Look out!" Bork yelled, as a jet black ball, the size of a tiny mouse,
rolled from behind the pile, instantly took energetic legs to itself,
and scurried with incredible speed straight up the concrete wall
directly before Crane's face. Crane's action was instinctive. He
straightened instantly to his full height, gave a convulsive leap and,
with his clenched fist, smashed the loathsome thing just as it was
about to scud beyond his reach. It fell, a mashed blob of evil black
body and twitching legs, plop into the eyepiece of the fluoroscope.
"You win this time," Crane grinned, turning the black mess over on its
back. "She's a black widow. Here's her trademark--the red hour glass
on her underside. We had better post a warning to the fellows to go
easy in the dark. This is the ideal breeding place for the brutes--dry
and warm, with plenty of old packing cases lying about. I'll have to
ask Mr. Kent to get this cluttered rats' nest cleaned up for once.
Well, shall we finish our shot?"
"What for?" Bork demanded.
"Just to prove that we haven't lost our nerve. Here, I'll remove the
evidence from the fluoroscope before you douse the lights. Better save
the remains for the Director," he continued, carefully depositing the
smashed spider in an empty cigar box, "or he'll say we've both been
hitting the bottle. Ready? Shoot; I've got the fluoroscope."
As the lights went off, Crane caught the dull flash of anger on Bork's
face. "I had better stop prodding him," he thought, "or he may stick a
knife into me. He's a grouch; no sense of humor."
Crane was partly right. Bork, a poorly educated mechanic with a
natural gift for delicate work, cherished a sour grudge against the
world in general and against the eighty trained scientists of the
Erickson Foundation in particular. They, he imagined, had profited by
the undue advantages of their social position, and had somehow--in what
particular way he could not define--swindled him out of the education
he merited. He had been denied the fair opportunity, which a democracy
is alleged to offer all comers, of making something of himself. Such
was his aggrieved creed.
As a matter of fact a good third of all the scientists on the staff had
earned their half starved way through high school, college and
university with no greater resources at their command than Bork
possessed when he was at the student age. That they preferred drudgery
for a spell to boozy good fellowship for the term of their
apprenticeship accounted for the present difference between their
status and his.
Bork had brains; there was no denying so obvious a fact. But he was
short on backbone. Being Crane's technical assistant, he naturally, if
only half consciously, stored up all his spite against life for Crane's
special amusement. Crane was the one man in the Foundation who could
have tolerated the grouchy Bork for more than a week. The rest would
have discharged him without compunction. Crane's wry sense of humor
gave him a more human angle on the dour churl. Although he would have
cut his tongue out, rather than acknowledge the fact, even to himself,
Crane hoped to save Bork from his sourer fraction and make a man of
him. This missionary drive lay behind his frequent digs at Bork's
tippling. Crane sensed the man's innate ability. That all this high
grade brain power should fritter itself away on peevish discontent and
sodden conviviality seemed to him an outrage against nature.
The exasperations of this particular day, culminating in the wreck of
the new cathode and the incident of the black widow, crystallized
Bork's sullen irritation toward Crane into a definite, hard hatred.
The uninitiated often marvel at the trivial grounds cited by the
injured party in a divorce suit, overlooking the ten or fifteen years
of constant fault-finding and mutual dislike concealed beneath the
last, insignificant straw.
So it proved in Bork's case. Crane's superior contempt for his
assistant's perfectly natural abhorrence of a venomous spider revealed
the full measure of the stronger man's subconscious scorn for a
weakling. Bork was no fool. He realized that although Crane had
always looked down on him as a somewhat spineless parody of a full
grown man, he himself had looked up to Crane, not with respect or
affection, but with smouldering hatred and the unacknowledged desire to
humble the better man to his own pygmy stature. And in that sudden
flash of revelation, struck out on the darkness of his thwarted nature
by a tactless jest, Bork saw himself as the appointed destroyer of his
would-be friend and natural enemy.
As he switched off the floodlights, and silently threw in the full two
million volts in eight perfectly timed steps of two hundred and fifty
thousand each, he resolved to get blind drunk the moment he was free of
Crane's supervision. He would not dull the edge of his projected spree
by foolishly indulging in lunch or supper. No; he would hurl himself
and all his forces raging and ravenously empty on the crudest, rawest
Scotch whiskey he could buy. What should happen thereafter would be up
to Crane alone. In any event Bork would win, in his perverse way, even
if it cost him a term in the penitentiary.
"How's that for penetration?" Crane demanded enthusiastically, holding
his hand before the fluoroscope in the path of the rays. They were
standing about a hundred feet away from the tube. Not a shadow of
flesh or bone showed on the fluoroscope. To those hard rays, the human
body was as transparent as rock crystal to sunlight. Bork gave a
grudging consent that it was pretty good. To test the penetration
further, Crane next tried to cast a shadow of the heavy iron rail,
against which he was leaning, on the fluorescent screen. Again the
penetrating radiation passed clear through the obstacle as if it were
air.
"And you're afraid," Crane exulted, "that rays which will pass like
these through iron can affect the insignificant cells of your body.
They wouldn't bother to stop for such stuff." Nevertheless it cost
Crane all of his self control to keep from tearing at his own tingling,
itching skin.
"Well, let's call it a day, and go home," he said.
On emerging from the laboratory they found a knot of curious idlers
gathered about the cracked cathode, vainly trying to puzzle out whose
the huge 'helmet' might be.
"We had better rescue that," Crane remarked, "before some loafer finds
out that it's valuable. We can't afford to lose several hundred
dollars' worth of platinum on top of our other hard luck."
Crane's thoughtless allusion to their mishap was the last straw. With
a smothered oath, Bork turned his back on the small crowd and strode
off toward the street.
"See you tomorrow at eight," Crane called after him.
Bork made no reply. Grinning broadly, Crane picked up the cathode and
started with it back to the workshops. The idlers, having thoughtfully
selected choice souvenirs of broken glass, dispersed. Had Crane been
as keen a student of human nature as he was of the physics of
radiation, he would have followed Bork and let the crowd keep the
costly cathode.
Chapter Two--_THE BOILING BOX_
Instead of hastily swallowing a meal and hurrying home to bed as he had
intended earlier in the afternoon, Crane sped as fast as his long legs
would take him to see his physician.
Dr. Brown, the specialist in radiology, who had already warned Crane of
the possible consequences of exposing himself recklessly to the hard
X-rays, lived within a quarter of a mile of the Erickson Foundation.
Being a family physician to about half the staff of the Foundation, he
understood their needs better than might the average doctor. More than
once he had been called out of bed in the small hours of the morning to
resuscitate some careless worker who had neglected the precautions of
common sense and been jolted into insensibility, or to pick splinters
of glass from hands and faces damaged in the pursuit of science. Brown
himself specialized in medical radiology, and was expert on everything
that an up-to-date physician should know about the action of cosmic
rays, X-rays, and ultra violet light on the human body. As a hobby he
kept abreast of biology in its less practical phases, particularly in a
study of the protozoa.
Crane found the doctor in. Without preliminaries of any kind, he
plunged into the middle of things.
"My whole skin burns and itches like the very devil."
"You've been working with your two million volt tube again? Without
any protection, as usual?"
Crane nodded, extending his bare forearm for Brown to examine. The
doctor studied the skin minutely through a powerful pocket lens and
shook his head.
"If there's anything wrong, a microscopical examination of the skin may
show it up. Everything looks perfectly normal through this. Sure it's
not just your imagination running away with what I said the other day?"
For answer Crane, unable longer to control himself, began tearing with
his nails at every accessible inch of skin on his body. Brown rose and
filled his hypodermic.
"This will stop it for a time. Go home and take a starch bath. Then
rub down with calamine ointment. If the itch comes back, stick it out
as long as you can before calling me. I'll probably be at home all
evening. If not, the housekeeper will give you the name of another
man. He will know what to do."
As the powerful shot took effect, the intolerable itching became
bearable, and Crane began to doubt that his discomfort was more than an
attack of nerves. Nevertheless he carried out the doctor's
instructions to the letter.
"Safety first," he grinned, stepping from the milky starch bath and
reaching for the towel. In his eagerness to live up to the doctor's
orders, Crane hastened to dry himself thoroughly and rub down his whole
body with calamine before even pulling the plug of the bath tub.
Having finished his rub, he turned round to let the water out, and
stopped short with an exclamation of amazement. The water, milky white
less than five minutes before, was now a vivid pink. Even as he
watched, the color deepened from red to crimson. In ten seconds the
strange fluid had taken on the characteristic hue of freshly shed
blood. Crane flung on his bathrobe and ran to the telephone.
In his haste to call Doctor Brown, Crane forgot to shut the bathroom
door after him. His landlady chanced to pass along the corridor on her
way down to the kitchen, just as Crane, in the telephone alcove, took
down the receiver. Like the good housekeeper she was, the landlady
made a move to close the bathroom door on her way past. The bathtub
full, apparently, of human blood, paralyzed her for two seconds before
she screamed. As she fled shrieking from the house, Crane succeeded in
getting his connection. Doctor Brown, listening at the other end of
the wire, heard ear-splitting shrieks and a man's voice which he failed
to recognize as his patient's requesting him to come at once to Crane's
apartment. He banged the receiver back on the hook and grabbed his
emergency kit. Crane, he imagined, driven insane by his torments, had
attempted to commit suicide.
On reaching Crane's apartment house, the doctor ran slap into enough
excitement to justify a dozen murders and suicides. The landlady, in
hysterics, was being supported on the lawn by two sympathetic
neighbors. Crane, gorgeous in a flaming orange bathrobe which flapped
about his long legs, was doing his best to convince three motorcycle
policemen and a clamoring mob of morbid sensation hunters that he had
committed no murder, but had merely indulged in a late afternoon bath.
The police had their hands full keeping the mob back.
With the skill acquired from many adventures with crowds and accidents,
Doctor Brown insinuated himself into the mob and quickly worked his way
to the police.
"I'm the doctor they telephoned for. What's up?"
"Nothing," the officer replied disgustedly, "if that fellow in the
kimono knows what he's talking about. Go in and 'phone headquarters to
send half a dozen men to help us."
Brown joined Crane on the porch, snatched him into the house, and
bolted the door. Then he telephoned to the police.
"What happened?" he demanded of Crane, on receiving the Chiefs
assurance that the riot squad was on its way.
"I followed your instructions," Crane grinned. "Come and have a look
at the bathtub."
With dramatic effect, Crane ushered the doctor into the bathroom and
gestured toward the tub. Then his jaw dropped. The water was as
starchy white as when he had stepped from the tub. Not a trace of all
that violent blood remained.
"Well?" the doctor demanded meaningly.
"The landlady saw it too," Crane began. "I'm not crazy."
"Saw what?"
Rather shamefacedly, Crane gave a short, but complete account of the
entire incident as it had seemed to happen. To his surprise, Brown did
not laugh.
"You think there may be something in it?" Crane ventured.
Brown was non-committal. He suspected Crane of a nervous breakdown,
but refrained from saying so.
"Let me take your temperature."
Crane submitted. His temperature was normal. So, as far as Brown
could judge, was everything else about him. The theory of a nervous
breakdown was abandoned.
"Find me a clean, empty bottle or a jam jar. I'll take a sample of the
water and find out if there is anything wrong with it."
While Crane rummaged in the kitchen, the doctor carefully salvaged the
teaspoonful of starch remaining in the empty cardboard container. He
was just conveying this to his bag, when the front door bell began
ringing insistently. At the same instant Crane reappeared with a clean
ketchup bottle.
"Don't answer the bell till I fill this. Otherwise the police may
smell a rat and bring the reporters down on our necks."
Hastily stowing the bottle of starchy water into his handbag, Brown
followed Crane to the front door. The instant the bolt was drawn, a
hard-faced captain of detectives thrust himself into the hallway.
"Where's the bathroom? You show me," he suggested grimly, seizing
Crane's arm.
"Sure," Crane grinned. "The city waterworks, if you like."
Deigning no reply, the captain hustled the suspect upstairs. Once in
the bathroom he gave a disgusted grunt at the tub, picked up the rag
rug, scrutinized it thoroughly, and finally inspected the articles in
the toilet cabinet.
"Does your landlady drink?" he demanded sourly.
"Never touched a drop in her life," Crane gallantly assured him.
"Then she's bughouse. If she throws another party like this one, she
goes to the asylum. Tell her that from me."
Turning on his heel, he quit the profitless investigation and clumped
downstairs. In his cocksureness that he saw through everything, he
overlooked the one clue of any value. It did not enter his head to
quiz the doctor then waiting in the hallway till the quieted mob should
disperse. What was a doctor doing in the house if everything was as it
seemed to be? Who had called him? Why? For failing to think of these
pertinent questions the skeptical captain deserved to lose at least one
stripe.
The moment the front door closed on the redoubtable captain, Brown
darted for the stairs. He met Crane half way.
"If your skin starts itching again, come to my house at once. I'll
give you a bath. Tell the landlady the heat affected her. I'll speak
to her on the way out."
"You think--" Crane began.
"Nothing. But it will be worth while to analyze this water, or
whatever it is. Well, I'm going before the reporters arrive. They
will have got wind of this at the police station. If anyone asks you
anything, leave me out of it. I can't afford this kind of advertising."
By the time Crane was dressed, the disappointed mob had dispersed, and
the distraught landlady was doing her feeble best to fend off the
persistent attacks of three able young reporters. Crane routed them.
"Beat it," he ordered curtly, entering the living room. "Can't you see
that this lady is suffering from the heat? That's all there is to it.
If you can make a story out of that you beat Hearst. Only," he
concluded with a grin as he bowed them out of the house, "the city
editor will scrap what you write. It would be a slam at our beautiful
climate. There's a dog fight down the street. Try your luck on that.
Scat!"
Having disposed of the press, Crane returned to the sitting room to
comfort the landlady.
"Is there anything I can get you?" he asked sympathetically.
"If you don't mind, you might bring me a little gin and water--not too
much water. The bottle is on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet."
The last information was superfluous so far as Crane was concerned. He
had discovered the half empty bottle while rummaging for what the
doctor wanted. He was careful not to ruin the landlady's pick-me-up by
too much water. In fact he gave her half a tumblerful straight, which
was just what she needed.
Having seen to the landlady's comfort, Crane attended to his own. He
slipped out to a restaurant, had a square meal, and hurried back to
bed. By eight o'clock he was between the sheets, determined to sleep
in spite of the faint prickling all over his body.
The moment he had finished his dinner, Doctor Brown settled down to
analyze the starchy water. Not being a skilled chemist he had to try
the only method in which he was expert--microscopic examination.
Should this reveal nothing unusual, he would submit a sample of the
water to a competent chemist for detailed analysis.
Brown approached his problem with an open mind. Having profited by an
excellent medical training, he was not addicted to forming opinions in
advance of the evidence. There might be precisely nothing strange
about that starchy water, or it might give a patient observer his first
glimpse of a new universe. The doctor was ready for either
contingency, or for neither.
With matter of fact deliberation he prepared the slide and carefully
adjusted the microscope. Long years of habit enabled him to come
within a shade of the true focus without looking through the eyepieces.
His instrument was a high-powered binocular, which threw up the minute
objects on the slide into solid relief. Having adjusted the focus
roughly as far as was safe, Brown completed the delicate operation
while looking through the eyepieces.
The singularly beautiful starch grains swam into stereoscopic view and
blurred out, as the slowly moving lens sought to bring up the light
from still minuter specks within reach of human vision. On the extreme
threshold of visibility, a new universe slowly dawned.
The silent watcher of that undiscovered heavens scarcely breathed.
Hour after hour he sat entranced, far from this world, as the first
acts of a titanic drama, never before imagined by the human mind,
unrolled majestically in a drop of water so tiny that no unaided eye
could see it.
While one man followed the dim beginnings of a new order in wonder and
awe that fateful night, another, blind with hatred and ignorant of what
he was doing, sought to destroy the instrument of fate which had thrust
the unknown universe up to the light and life. True to his brainless
vow, Bork got soddenly drunk as fast as bad whiskey would let him. A
dispassionate critic from a wiser planet, if confronted with Brown,
Crane and Bork, that evening, might well have doubted that the three
were animals of one and same species--_homo sapiens_, so-called. Brown
and Crane he might easily have classified as sports from the same
family tree; Bork undoubtedly would have puzzled him.
The vile whiskey, more like crude varnish and alcohol than a civilized
drink, had an unprecedented effect on Bork's exhausted body. His
customary experience after a full quart of the stuff was a feeling of
general well being and a greatly inflated self-esteem. This spree was
strangely different from all of its innumerable predecessors. Instead
of experiencing the comforting glow which he anticipated, the wretched
man felt chilled to the bone. The world turned gray before his eyes.
He saw his own life, pale and ineffectual as a defeated spirit,
wandering aimlessly hither and thither through a cheerless fog of
unending years. Why must he endure it longer? The drink had made him
deadly sober. A remorseless tongue, loosened by the alcohol,
insinuated that he was an unnecessary accident, a dismal thing that
should never have been trusted with life, and a mistake to be corrected
and forgotten as quickly as possible.
Bork sighed, slowly extracted the cork from the second quart, poured
out a tumblerful of the raw stuff, and sat meditatively sipping it. As
the alcohol seeped into his tissues, the insane clarity of his mind
increased.
By midnight he had disposed of three full quarts of alleged whiskey.
This equalled his previous record. By one in the morning he had
bettered his record by a quart and was ripe for his insanely logical
action. In his normal state he could not have reasoned so coldly, so
clearly, so consistently. Crazed by the drink, he became as rigidly
logical as a hopeless maniac. Glancing at his watch, he rose steadily
to his feet, and marched from his frowsy lodging to execute his purpose
and to silence that persistent voice which said he was born a fool.
It was a few minutes past two in the morning when Bork silently let
himself into the twenty million volt laboratory and locked the door
behind him. His immediate business was too serious to admit a smile.
Yet he almost smiled as he reflected that Crane would have the
satisfaction of thinking--not saying--"that fool Bork has blundered
again."
Crane's exasperating silence had given Bork the first inkling of the
bitter truth. Now he, the despised assistant, the man who might easily
have been chief had nature not loaded the dice against him, would prove
that he was the better man in one thing at least--unanswerable
destruction.
The man who can hurt his friend is, after all, the stronger of the two.
Bork switched on the floodlights and prepared to prove his superior
strength.
He set about his awful business deliberately, determined for once not
to blunder. Having descended the steel stairs to the vast pit of the
transformers, he made the necessary connections to link up the forty
huge gray devils into a single unit. The forty were now ready to smite
as one, with the full bolt of their twenty million volts, whatever
accident or design might offer them to destroy. Like a callous priest
preparing a peace offering to Moloch, Bork quickly and accurately made
ready the pride of Crane's heart as a sacrifice to the forty united
devils. The two million volt X-ray tube, Crane's "baby," was linked
into the chain of destruction to appease the forty and prove Bork a
better man than his tormentor.
His preparation was not yet complete. Not only must Crane be humbled,
but the pitiless logic of his own subconscious mind must be refuted
forever. He connected one end of a long, stout copper wire to that
which was to feed twenty million volts into the X-ray tube, made a
large loop of the free end, passed the loop over his left arm, and
dragged the trailing wire after him up the steel steps to the gallery
of the switches.
To secure the effect he wanted, all switches must be closed
simultaneously, releasing twenty million volts in one flash. This
presented no difficulty. The switches he must use were ranged in one
horizontal line eight feet long. Temporarily winding the loop round an
iron upright, Bork was ready for his problem.
First he all but closed the whole row of switches, bringing the eight
foot line of ebonite handles into the same sloping plane. Then he
glanced about for a narrow eight-foot board or strip. The pile of
scrap lumber, behind which Crane had thrust his hand to scare out the
black widow, contained just what Bork sought. At the bottom of the
pile were several narrow lengths of white pine, the remains of large
packing cases, from six to twelve feet long and four to six inches wide.
Taking no chance of encountering another venomous spider, Bork
disengaged the desired piece of lumber with his foot before venturing
to pick it up. Then, ashamed of his lack of courage in the face of
what he was about to do, he propped the narrow board against the iron
railing and turned to the bench beneath the switches. To prove himself
not a coward, he put forth a steady hand and raised the lid of the
cigar box into which Crane had dropped the crushed remains of the black
widow.
She still lay there, black and venomous looking as death itself. Every
fiber of her apparently was dead. As he stared down in cold
fascination at the hideous, crushed thing, Bork detected not the
slightest tremor in any of her eight long, smooth, black legs. All
were curved stiffly inward, rigid in death, above the red hour glass on
her mangled body. She was dead. To put his sorry manhood to a crucial
test before joining the thing he instinctively loathed in death, Bork
put out a finger and lifted each leg in turn. Six remained attached to
the body, two dropped off.
"Dead," he muttered, closing the lid of the cigar box to shut out the
sight of that repulsive corpse which he no longer feared worse than
death itself.
His final preparations were brief. In a few seconds he had the copper
loop fastened securely about his neck, and the long narrow board evenly
balanced in both hands. He laid the board lightly along the eight foot
row of ebonite switches. Then, with a convulsive movement of both
arms, he shoved the board back and down, instantly throwing in the full
battery of switches and releasing the irresistible fury of twenty
million volts to shatter everything in their fiery path, himself
included, to a chaos of incandescent atoms.
The instantaneous surge of energy missed one of its marks. A deafening
report followed the blinding green flash where the copper junction of
the wire which was to have electrocuted Bork vaporized instantly.
Before the current could leap along its entire length the first twenty
feet of the wire exploded to atoms in a cloud of green fire. Bork's
efficiency in making the connection had saved his life; a looser
contact would have let but a fraction of the current through the wire
to destroy him before it consumed the conductor. He had blundered
again. His grandiose project had nullified itself in a short circuit
which he should have foreseen.
Dazed and uncertain whether he was still living, he stared
uncomprehendingly over the pit of the transformers and upon the X-ray
tube. The floodlights, on an independent circuit, still filled the
laboratory with an intolerable glare. Not a trace of corona flickered
on any of the apparatus. The giant transformers loomed up, cold, gray
and dead. The echo of the exploded wire seemed still to haunt the
oppressive silence.
Gradually the stunned man became aware of the X-ray tube. Built to
withstand the impact of two million volts, it should have been
annihilated under the surging shock of twenty million. Had it taken
the full bolt, or had the half foot of wire from the cathode to Bork's
too efficient connection volatilized before the current could leap the
short gap? That it received at least a fraction of the intended
maximum was evident, for the lower half of the tube quivered and
scintillated in coruscating pulses of sheer white light. The upper
half of the vacuum in the tube, from the cathode down, was as black as
ebony. Impenetrable darkness and sheer light were severed from one
another absolutely; no shadow from the black dimmed the upper
brilliance of the seething light, and no pulse of the white fire greyed
the massive black above the invisible barrier.
Whatever might be taking place in that tube, it was automatic and
independent of any extraneous electrical influences. The wires
connecting the tube to the feeding apparatus had burned out, and the
entire laboratory, except the floodlights, was electrically dead. As
Bork watched, the black crept slowly downward. The diminishing light,
devoured from above by the descending void, increased in intensity, as
if struggling fiercely to resist and vanquish the death which crept
down upon it. To the dazed man it appeared almost as if a plunging
piston of steel were compressing the resistant light down to nothing.
Within three minutes but half an inch of dazzling white fire remained.
Laboring against the last desperate struggle of the light to survive,
the black crept down more slowly. The last half inch dwindled to a
mere plane of light as fiercely brilliant as the furnace core of a
star. Then, in a second, the last light vanished, and the tube, now
wholly black, exploded with a report that rocked the laboratory like an
earthquake and hurled Bork to the steel floor of the gallery.
When he came to his senses he found himself staring up through a
phosphorescent glow to the dimly visible concrete ceiling. The
explosion which had stunned him had shattered the globes of the
floodlights. He got to his feet and reeled toward the door, only to
trip over the copper wire dangling from his neck. With a curse he
freed himself and fumbled for his key. Some moving object impinged
gently against the back of his hand, seeming to break silently, and
dispersed, leaving behind it only a faint sensation of cold. Another
struck him in the face, and again he sensed the flow of heat from his
skin. He became aware that his hands and face were slowly freezing.
To escape from that silent place of horror was his one instinct. The
key in his pocket eluded his clumsy, half frozen fingers. Still dazed,
he did not seek to discover the source of those moving things that
touched his bare face as gently as kisses in a dream and slowly drained
his body of its natural heat. At last he managed to grasp the key and
insert it in the lock. His chilled fingers refused to function. He
began beating wildly with his numbed fists against the steel door,
conscious that he was slowly dying. Two of the moving objects softly
struck the steel above his head, lingered for a moment and vanished
into total darkness. He saw what they were.
The black air of the laboratory was alive with thousands of spinning
vortices of faint light drifting in all directions, rebounding unharmed
from one another when two or more collided, and dying only when they
struck some material obstruction--walls, ceilings or apparatus. It was
the mazy wanderings of this silent host which revealed the darkness
against flickers and flashes of dim, tumultuous light. Their numbers
diminished rapidly, for they seemed to seek their own extinction,
quickening their motion as they drew near to solid substances and
jostling one another in their eagerness to cease to be. In ten minutes
the darkness would have conquered, but Bork did not wait to see its
victory.
A slight rustling on the bench behind him made him spin round in
anticipatory fear. Almost before the horror happened he sensed its
advent. The lid of the cigar box, in which the crushed black widow
lay, flipped up as if some frantic living thing were trying to escape.
The lid subsided for an instant, then again flapped sharply up an
eighth of an inch. Bork reached the door in one leap. This time his
fingers functioned automatically. Glancing back as he flung open the
steel door, he saw in the dim phosphorescence of the expiring vortices,
a sight that reached the very roots of his fear.
The lid of the cigar box was thrown completely back on the bench by a
rapidly swelling black mass that foamed up explosively from the box
like living soot. As he slammed the door he caught a last glimpse of
the boiling black mass budding upon itself in furious vitality and
overflowing bench, platform and stairs in one hideous deluge of
unnatural life.
He turned the key in the lock and reeled off into the icy grey pearl of
the stirring dawn, sane at last with an awful sanity.
Chapter Three--_REBORN_
Bork roomed in a shabby house in a shabbier street, as the only lodger
of a deaf and half blind old man, by the name of Wilson, who saw him
only once a month to collect the rent. Old Wilson seldom knew when his
lodger entered or left the house, and he cared less. What the old man
had done for a living in his prime was more or less of a mystery.
Report had it that he was a broken down Alaskan miner who had made and
lost a dozen fortunes. Before going completely broke he had bought
himself a shack of a house and invested his remaining capital in
government bonds, on the meagre income of which, and the rent from the
upstairs spare room, he eked out a Spartan existence. The place was
ideal for Bork, who hated the habitual prying of even the most reserved
landladies. Old Wilson never entered his lodger's room. Consequently
it was cluttered with empty bottles shamelessly exposed.
In spite of his age, Wilson was not an early riser. He enjoyed his ten
hours in bed best of the twenty-four.
About half past four on the morning of his mad escapade in the
laboratory, Bork stumbled up the rickety stairs to his room. The
necessity for an alibi in case of investigations regarding the
shattered tube was beginning to dawn on him. He knew that old Wilson
would not hear him so he made no effort to walk softly. The alibi
presented itself ready made. At seven o'clock Wilson's customary hour
for rising, Bork would hunt up the old man in his kitchen and pay the
rent a day in advance. Then the old fellow could swear that Bork had
spent the night in his room, and believe his oath.
Opening the door of his room, Bork found the light still on. A half
quart of whiskey stood on the untidy bureau. It was but natural in his
shattered state that he should take a bracer to steady his lacerated
nerves. He poured himself a stiff jolt and raised it to his lips. As
the reek of the crude alcohol fumed his nostrils he was overcome by a
strong feeling of revulsion. Yet he imagined that he needed the drink
desperately. His attempt to swallow it proved unsuccessful; his body
simply rejected the proffered mercy. A healthy young savage almost
invariably rebels against his first swallow of raw whiskey, whatever
may be his reactions to his hundredth. Bork was in precisely the same
condition, except that his aversion was a thousandfold more intense.
To down a drink in his present condition was impossible.
Instinctively he hurled tumbler and bottle to the floor, smashing three
empties in the act.
"What a fool I've been," he muttered. "I must have been sick as a dog
to like that stuff."
Aware of an indefinable sense of power, he clenched and unclenched his
fists, watching the ripple of the firm muscles beneath the skin.
Presently he started. His hands, ordinarily a pasty yellow, were
tanned a deep, healthy brown. He might have been working for months
outdoors beneath a tropical sun.
A startled glance in the shaving mirror above the bureau confirmed his
half formed suspicion. His face was as swarthy as a Hindoo's, and his
yellow, fine hair had turned jet black and as coarse as an Indian's.
Even these radical changes, however, failed to account for the utter
difference between the face staring wide-eyed from the dusty mirror and
the familiar features which he remembered as his own. A more
fundamental alteration had transformed his appearance completely.
Suddenly he recognized its nature. His blue, cold eyes had turned
black and strangely luminous. With a terrific shock he perceived also
that he appeared to have grown younger.
In silence he slowly began removing his clothes. Five hours before his
body had been like a young boy's, smooth, white, and practically
hairless. Now his skin was the same rich brown hue, from heels to
head, as his face and hands. Moreover, his chest, arms and legs were
covered by a thick growth of coarse black hair like a professional
weight-lifter's. From skin to marrow he was physically a different
man. No one who had known him intimately five hours previously could
have identified him as Neils Bork. This was a different man.
"Who am I?" he asked aloud, reaching for his shirt.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he realized two further
changes from the man he had been, each of the profoundest significance.
The querulous voice of Neils Bork had deepened and become vibrantly
resonant. It was the voice of a man with both strength and personality
and an assured confidence in his power to use them to his own
advantage. It also was a voice that would attract women. Second, he
noticed a new trick of habit, that was to become instinctive. The hand
reaching for the shirt drew back, and for a simple, natural reason.
The shirt was soiled. To put such a thing next to his skin--Bork had
never worn underclothes-was an impossibility to the new man.
From the bureau drawer he selected his best shirt, a white linen
freshly laundered, which he had worn but once or twice. The shabby
suit was discarded in favor of his single decent one, a gray tropical
wool. This he had not worn for over a year. The cut was a trifle out
of date. That, however was of no consequence. The suit was wearable,
having been dry-cleaned before it was put away. Clean socks, his best
shoes and a plain black scarf, which he had discarded as being too tame
after one wearing, completed his outfit. It did not occur to him to
seek a hat; his thick, black hair afforded ample protection from sun
and weather.
Although the old Bork had been a heavy, consistent drinker, he was not
absolutely thriftless. From a slovenly suitcase stuffed with soiled
clothes and worthless letters from girls a little less than worthless,
the new man extracted the "dead" Bork's carefully hoarded savings.
These amounted to about six hundred dollars in ten and twenty-dollar
bills.
By a quarter past five the new man was ready to face his dawning life.
Thrusting the roll of bills into a trousers pocket, he started for the
door. Then he remembered poor old Wilson's rent. Although neither
alibi nor disguise was now necessary, the new man felt that it would be
wise to dispose of the old forever. Having found a stub of a pencil,
he scribbled a note on the back of some forgotten girl's scented
envelope.
"_Mr. Wilson: The enclosed ten dollars is for the month's rent I
owe you. As you will see from my room, I have been a steady
drinker. The stuff has got me at last. Rather than give my boss
the satisfaction of firing me, as he must sooner or later, I am
firing myself. Give this note to the police. They will find my
body in the Pacific Ocean if they want it, and if the crabs don't
get it first. Neils Bork_"
On his way out of the house he slipped the envelope with the ten-dollar
bill under the kitchen door. Old Wilson was not yet stirring. The new
man took with him nothing but his money and the clothes he wore. No
one saw him leave the house; it was still too early for decent workers
to be going about their business. He strode briskly along, conscious
of a new vitality coursing through his veins like the elixir of life
itself.
While the man who had been Bork was confidently marching to meet his
destiny, Crane lay tossing and muttering in his fitful sleep, tormented
again by the prickling of his skin. Shortly after six o'clock he awoke
fully and leapt from his bed. The itching was much less severe than
the first attack. Nevertheless it was sufficiently distressing to make
him hurry his dressing and rush to the doctor's house.
Brown had not gone to bed. The curious glance he shot Crane was almost
hostile.
"What's up?" he asked, feeling the doctor's restraint.
"That's what I want to know," Brown answered shortly. "Where have you
been the past week?"
"At my usual stand," Crane grinned. "The workshop of the Foundation,
the twenty million volt laboratory, at home in bed, and up the street
for my meals."
"Is that all?" the doctor demanded suspiciously.
"Sure. Where did you think I'd been?"
"I couldn't guess," the doctor replied slowly, "unless it might have
been some low dive of Mexicans or Orientals. Whatever it may be that
you've got yourself infected with is new to any science I know. Your
case is unique. Itching again?"
Crane nodded. "Save the lecture till after you've cured me. Then I'll
listen and admit anything you like."
"The cure will be easy enough. You must soak yourself in disinfectants
till the last particle of scale or dust is sterilized and removed from
your skin. It may be a long job. Take boiling hot baths and make
yourself perspire freely before you rub down with the disinfectants.
Then do it all over again two hours later. Keep at it until the
itching stops completely. I'll write out the prescriptions."
"You seem sore about something," Crane remarked as the doctor handed
him a sheaf of prescriptions. "Why don't you speak up and get it off
your chest?"
"I will when I know what it is myself. You give me your word you're
telling the truth about what you have been doing?"
"Of course. Why should I lie? If you want to check up, ask the men at
the Foundation and my landlady."
"Then," said Brown, "we are going to discover something brand new. By
the way, I should like to examine your assistant--Bork, isn't it? Has
he been working with you all the time?"
"In the shops, yes. But not in the twenty million volt laboratory. I
must have put in thirty hours with my two million volt tube going at
full blast during the past eight months. Bork hasn't been around it
more than an hour all told at the most."
Brown considered in silence for some moments.
"Will you let me try an experiment with your tube?"
"Any time you like, if I handle the switches. I would let you do it
yourself if you had worked around high tension apparatus. You give the
instructions and I'll deliver what you want."
"Very well. How about one o'clock this afternoon? I must get some
sleep first. You go home and sterilize your skin."
"That will suit me. I'll be in the high tension laboratory at one
o'clock. Ring the bell and I will let you in. You can't give me a
hint of what you think you're doing?"
"I could. But why go off half-cocked? Either this is the biggest
thing in a thousand years, or I'm completely fooled. This afternoon
will decide."
Doctor Brown's discovery was not, however, to receive its test so soon.
The late Neils Bork had made that impossible.
The doctor had intended going straight to bed the moment Crane left.
Sleep, he now realized, was out of the question. To quiet his busy
mind he must pacify it by consulting the voluminous biological
literature that would at least eliminate the chance of making crude,
ignorant blunders.
By good fortune the Aesculapian Society had a prosperous branch in
Seattle with an excellent scientific library covering all phases of
biology and medicine. Doctor Brown was local vice-president of the
Society. His pass-key would admit him to the library at any hour of
the day or night, a privilege not shared by ordinary members. He
shaved, asked the housekeeper for a cup of coffee, pocketed the rough
sketches of what he had seen under the microscope, and hurried off to
the biological library. There he spent five hours from seven till noon
poring over biological atlases and massive treatises on the
protozoa--those simplest of all animals.
With a sigh, as the clock chimed out a musical twelve, he closed his
books and rose to prepare for his appointment with Crane. All his
painstaking search had so far yielded no glance of a similarity between
what was already known to science and what he had discovered. Thus far
the outcome was encouraging. But the mass of ascertained fact about
the humblest living creatures is so enormous that Brown estimated his
good fortune at its precise value--nothing. A search of weeks would be
necessary before he could assert confidently that he had made a vital
discovery--if indeed he had.
His preparations for the approaching experiment with Crane were simple
in the extreme. Having lunched at a cafeteria, he asked one of the
girls behind the counter for a dozen raw, new laid eggs. Half of these
were for the test, the other six to control the test. Part of the
necessary apparatus he hoped to find in Crane's laboratory; the rest he
must provide himself.
"Where can I buy a hen?" he asked the girl.
Thinking him slightly mad, the girl replied that there was a poultry
market six blocks up the street. Brown thanked her and drove to the
market. There he purchased a most motherly looking, clucking Buff
Orpington on exhibit, a large slat coop to house her in, and loaded her
on the back seat of his open car.
The spectacle of the well-known Doctor Brown threading his way through
traffic with an eloquent brown hen as passenger caused several traffic
jams. However, he got his collaborator home safely and turned her
loose in the walled back garden. Before leaving her to enjoy the
tender young zinnia seedlings, he made a passable nest of excelsior in
the slat cage and presented the prospective mother with half a dozen
new laid eggs. With that attention to details which is half of
scientific success, the doctor marked an indelible blue cross on each
of the eggs, so that the 'controls' 'should not be lost among the
mother's possible contributions.
"Do your stuff, Bertha," he counselled, carefully disposing three of
the remaining half dozen eggs in each side pocket, "and I'll do mine.
Good bye; I'm half an hour late already."
During the five hours that Brown was winding his devious way through
mazes of the protozoa in the Aesculapian library, the man who had been
Bork made rapid explorations into the wonders and mysteries of his
transmuted personality. On reaching the main business street nearest
his former lodging, he eagerly sought out a restaurant. The old Bork
had always fought shy of breakfast, for obvious reasons. The new man
was ravenously hungry. It was still very early. In his rapid walk he
passed several cheap, all-night lunch counters, hesitated for a moment
before each, and quickened his pace, to leave them behind as rapidly as
possible. This swarthy young man with the strangely luminous eyes was
fastidious to a fault.
At last he found what he wanted, a spotlessly clean, airy lunch room
with white glass tables and a long cooking range under a hood and in
full view of the customers. A girl in a white cap and clean white
smock, her arms bare to the shoulders, was deftly turning flapjacks on
a gasplate by the window. As the new customer entered, she glanced up
from her work. Ordinarily a second's inspection of the men who passed
her by the hundred every day satisfied her curiosity. There was an
indefinable 'something' about this new man, however, which riveted her
attention immediately. Unconscious that he was being watched, the
swarthy young man walked to the far end of the room and sat down at a
small table.
"That's somebody," she remarked to herself, but half aware of what she
meant. She was right. This man was 'somebody,' not a mere 'anybody'
undistinguishable in any significant way from tens of millions as
commonplace as himself.
The 'somebody' was giving his order to an elderly waiter.
"Excuse me, sir," the waiter began diffidently, "but haven't I seen you
in the pictures?"
The 'somebody' threw back his head and roared with a deep, resonant
laughter. It was an echo of the laughter of the gods. Early
breakfasters turned in their chairs fascinated and amused by that
hearty, good-natured shout, wondering what the joke was.
The embarrassed waiter stammered an apology.
"That's all right. No, you have never seen me in the movies, and I
hope nobody ever will. Ask the cook to hurry that order, like a good
fellow, will you? I'm starving."
Still unconscious of the sensation he was causing, the stranger
casually inspected the simple decorations and general arrangement of
the room.
"It just misses being good," he thought. "What's wrong? It's clean
enough, and the fresco doesn't jar like most."
The day manager had just arrived and was taking up his position behind
the glass cigar counter. Seeing a new customer, and a
distinguished-looking one, apparently in need of attention, he walked
down to inquire what he wished.
"Have you been waited on?"
"Yes, thanks."
"Is there anything I could do for you?"
"Probably not. It's too late now. I was just thinking that the
architect missed a masterpiece by a mere hair-breadth. If this room
were three feet longer, two feet narrower, and seven inches higher, the
proportions would be perfect. The tables don't fit, even now," he
went, on, unconscious of the astonishment on the manager's face.
"Don't you see," he continued earnestly, "what a stupid waste it is to
bungle a room that might be perfect if only a little forethought were
given?"
"Excuse me, but are you an artist?"
Again the answer was a shout of laughter.
"No," the swarthy young man replied, subsiding. "And I never will be
so long as I keep what mind I have."
"Then may I ask what your profession is, Mr.--?"
The luminous black eyes seemed for a second to look back and inward.
What name should he give himself? For the moment, although his mind
worked at lightning speed, the new man had difficulty in recalling what
his name had been.
Bork; that was it. Obviously it must be discarded.
His eyes roved to the cigar counter.
"De Soto," he said, slightly altering the name of a popular cigar
advertised in red and gold on a placard behind the counter. The name
would fit Portugal, Mexico, Spain or South America and definitely rule
out the Orient. Some touch of the torrid south was necessary to
explain his coloring.
It was a wise choice.
"I hope you'll drop in often, Mr. De Soto," the manager replied. He
meant exactly what he said, for he, too, felt a subtle attraction to
this dark young fellow who was the picture of health, and who could
laugh so infectiously.
"I shall be delighted whenever I am in the neighborhood."
His breakfast arriving at the moment, further exchange was left to the
future, and the manager retired to the ledger.
"'De Soto,'" he muttered to himself; "where have I heard that name
before? Wasn't there an early Spanish explorer of that name? Still,
this boy doesn't look Spanish, and he hasn't the trace of a foreign
accent. He's somebody, whoever he is. I must ask him when he goes out
what he does."
De Soto's breakfast was perfectly cooked and beautifully served, from
the rare tenderloin steak and crisp French fried potatoes to the sliced
oranges. It was the breakfast that a strong laboring man would have
ordered--if he could have afforded to pay for it. No modern business
man or sedentary scholar could have looked it in the face. De Soto
disposed of the last morsel. There remained only the black coffee--a
reminiscence of the dead, shaky Bork. At the first sip De Soto hastily
set down the cup. Even this mild stimulant reacted on his perfectly
tuned body. It was impossible for him to touch the stuff.
The sip of coffee had a curious effect on De Soto. Of what did it
remind him? Someone he had known? No; that wasn't it. Everyone at
the tables near his was drinking coffee and apparently enjoying it.
Evidently it was a common and harmless indulgence. Then what was it
that he was struggling to recall? It concerned himself, personally and
intimately. Of that he felt certain. From the fast receding life
which he had left behind him forever, a voice like that of a drowning
man whispered "Bork". De Soto half remembered.
"'Bork'?" he muttered to himself. "Who was Bork? Ah, I begin to
remember. He was the man--electrician, or something of that sort--who
committed suicide some months ago by drowning himself. Where did he do
it? I seem to recall that ha drowned himself in his room, but that's
impossible. I've got it! The Pacific Ocean. Was it that? How could
it be--it's too vague. The Pacific Ocean might mean anything from here
to--"
His thoughts broke off abruptly, baffled by his inability to recall
"China". Not only his own past was being rapidly swallowed up in a
devouring blank, but also much of his elementary knowledge of the world
which he had acquired as a schoolboy. For a moment he felt mentally
ill. He knew that he should remember, and wondered why he could not.
"I cannot have lost all my mental habits," he thought. Setting his
teeth, he reached for the menu. "Can I still read? If not, my
intellect is gone."
He opened the elaborate card. The effect was electric. Instantly the
long pages of close print registered on his mind as on a photographic
plate. Without the slightest conscious effort he had read and
memorized two large pages of heterogeneous, disconnected items in a
single glance. He smiled and reached for the morning paper which the
man at the adjoining table had left behind. As fast as he could turn
the thirty-two crowded pages he scanned them at a glance, photographed
every item, whether news or advertisements, indelibly on his
consciousness, and digested the meaning of all. Curiously enough he
believed that he had "always" read in this manner. An apparent
inconsistency, however, caused him a moment's uneasiness. There was
much in the morning's news about the fighting in China. Reading of
China, he visualized instantly all that he had ever known or imagined
about that country and its people. Why then was he unable to remember
the name when he tried consciously to recall it?
"I must have the stimulus of innumerable associations to think about
any one thing, I suppose," he mused. "What was I going to do when I
came in here? Breakfast, of course. But what had I planned to do
next? It was connected with that man Bork's trade. Electrician. That
was it. I know now; I was on my way to ask for work where I can study
electricity, X-rays, and all that sort of thing. Why, I have always
dabbled in electricity. How stupid of me to forget. My stomach must
be badly upset. Well, I'll dabble no longer. This time I go into it
for all I'm worth. Where the deuce was I going?"
Suddenly the name Crane flashed into his mind. For no reason that he
was capable of discovering, De Soto began to rock with uncontrollable
laughter. There was a tremendous joke somewhere, but what it was all
about he could not for the life of him say. Nevertheless he continued
to shout with jovial laughter till the whole restaurant turned to stare
at him. Aware of their puzzled faces, he made a pretense of reading
the comic strips of the paper and controlled himself. It was time to
escape before some shrewd busybody should guess the secret of his
joke--which he did not know himself. That was the funniest part of it.
Who and what was Crane? Whatever the elusive Crane might be, he was at
the bottom of De Soto's haunting, mysterious joke. Calming himself, he
beckoned to the waiter.
"Will you pay the cashier? I have no small change. Please bring me a
telephone directory."
When the waiter returned with the change and the directory, De Soto
tipped him generously and proceeded to look up Crane. There were
several Cranes listed. Their first names or initials all seemed
somehow wrong. De Soto closed the directory and let his mind drift. A
single glance had sufficed to print the entire list of Cranes, their
addresses and occupations, on the sensitive retina of his mind. One
name, Andrew Crane, room 209, Erickson Foundation, seemed to stand out
from all the others. Why? What was the Erickson Foundation? He
decided to ask the manager on his way out.
"Can you tell me where the Erickson Foundation is?"
The manager gave clear directions for reaching it.
"What sort of a place is it?" De Soto asked.
The manager, bursting with civic pride, enlarged upon the world fame of
the Foundation, which was heavily advertised In the local papers. He
even boasted that Doctor Crane had made the most powerful X-ray tube in
the world, and was now nearly ready with a giant that would surpass
anything the Foundation's jealous rivals could hope to produce for a
hundred years--perhaps for two hundred.
"Are you in the electrical line?"
"Only a student," De Soto replied instantly. "I plan to go into X-ray
work as soon as I have finished my course."
"Where are you studying, if I may ask?"
De Soto hesitated, nonplussed. Where, exactly, was he studying? Had
he ever studied?
"Oh, I'm just reading by myself."
The moment he had uttered the words, De Soto knew that he had told a
falsehood. Instantly he corrected himself. It seemed the only natural
thing to do; the lie tasted worse than coffee.
"I meant to say," he apologized, "that I'm going to start my reading
this morning."
"Oh," said the manager. Then, irresistibly attracted by this frank
young man with the singularly penetrating black eyes, he added.
"You'll make good. Some day we'll hear of you in the Foundation. Drop
in again."
De Soto left the restaurant, followed by the hungry eyes of the
flapjack girl and by those of every other woman in the place. Although
he was now so far ahead of his past that to look back on Bork was
impossible, he had a strange feeling of "difference". From whom was he
different? The faces of the men and women he met gave him no clue.
"Can you direct me to the Public Library, please?" he asked a traffic
officer.
"Two blocks north--that way; three west."
He reached the library just as the doors were opened. At the reference
desk he asked where the books on electricity and X-rays were kept. To
his surprise the middle-aged woman in charge did not reply immediately.
She could not. Something in this strange young man's face reminded her
of a boy who had been dead twenty-five years. There was not the
slightest physical resemblance between the features of this
dark-skinned, singularly intelligent-looking young man and those of the
boy whose face had almost faded from her memory. Yet the one passion
of her desolate life flamed up at her again.
"I'll show you where they are, Mr.--"
"De Soto," he supplied.
"Pardon me for asking, but are you related to the Stanley Wilshires?"
"Not that I know of. I was born in Buenos Aires, and all my people
have lived there for generations. Why do you ask?"
"You reminded me of someone--not your face, but your look. I must have
been mistaken. Here are the electrical books. The X-ray material is
in the next stack. You may use that table."
"Thank you. I shall probably stay here all day, as I have a lot of
reading to do."
The librarian walked thoughtfully back to her desk. "I could have
sworn it was Frank looking at me again. How silly!"
Many a woman was to experience a like feeling on first seeing De Soto's
face. What attracted them, or what recalled the men they had loved,
they could not have said, for it was beyond simple analysis. It was
not an instinct for sympathy, for De Soto's face suggested confident
strength rather than sympathy. Possibly the secret lay in the message
of superb, clear vitality that shown from his eyes, recalling the
heightened manhood with which these starvelings, in the fondness of
their imagination, had once endowed their lovers--before they learned
that fact and fancy are a universe apart. Here was a man who lived
with his whole body, as they would have wished their lovers to live,
not rotting by inches year after year into a lump that was human only
in name.
While De Soto in the Public Library, and Doctor Brown in the
Aesculapian, unaware of one another's existence, were unconsciously
storing up ammunition for a grand assault on one of time's deepest
mysteries, old Wilson precipitated the official suicide of Bork. On
rising at seven o'clock to prepare his breakfast, the old fellow found
the envelope with the rent. His eyes were still good enough to make
out, in a hazy way, a ten-dollar bill. They also perceived that there
was writing on the envelope. Poor old Wilson had a premonition of the
truth: his precious lodger had decamped, and this was his heartless way
of breaking the terrible news. Without stopping to get his breakfast
he doddered over to his nearest neighbor's.
The obliging neighbor shouted the dire message, a word at a time, into
Wilson's better ear.
"You had better tell the police at once."
"Eh?"
"The police. Tell them at once."
"You do it. I've got to find another fool to rent my room."
The neighbor obliged the old man willingly. The service would get his
own name into print.
The ten o'clock "noon edition" of the evening papers gave the
sublimated Bork a generous headline and toyed in audible whispers with
the dead man's shocking allusion to crabs. They also, one and all,
lamented the regrettable and undeserved notoriety which this suicide
would bring upon the world-famous Erickson Foundation.
The Director of the Foundation first learned the facts from one of his
enemies with a low taste for extras. This gentleman telephoned his
sympathy--"I have just heard the distressing news. Oh, don't you know?
One of your staff has committed suicide in a shocking manner--gave
himself to the crabs. Who was it? Neils Bork. You say he was only a
technical assistant? The newspapers don't mention that. This will be
a terrible blow to the good name of the Foundation. Well, you may
count on me to do what I can."
The Director preferred not to count on his friends. Instead, he got
Crane on the telephone--following a long wait during which Crane
hastily dried himself after his second stewing.
"What's all this about Bork committing suicide?" the Director snapped.
"Suicide? I know nothing about it. You must be mistaken."
"The papers are full of it."
"Excuse me a minute. This is a shock."
Crane sat down suddenly on the chair beside the telephone and buried
his face in his hands. In spite of his "kidding", he had liked Bork.
For perhaps the first time he realized fully how deeply attached he had
been to the surly fellow whom he had tried his best to make something
of. Although reason convinced him that bad whiskey and hot he was
responsible for the tragedy, a deeper voice accused him relentlessly.
"If it is true, I'll see what can be done."
"Very well. Please come to my office as soon as you can. This will
give us a black eye with the trustees."
"I'll be down in half an hour."
Chapter Four--_THE WIDOW'S REVENGE_
On reaching the laboratory shortly after one-thirty, Doctor Brown found
a note addressed to himself stuck to the steel door by a strip of
adhesive tape. It was from Crane, stating that he was "in conference"
with the director, Mr. Kent, and asking the doctor to come to Kent's
private office.
Not having seen the extras featuring Bork's suicide, Brown wondered
what was up. "In conference" usually meant a wigging for some
unfortunate member of the staff. Brown knew Kent well and did not
exactly respect him. Kent, whose talents were purely political and
administrative, boasted only a high school education. For his
particular job he was competent enough, although his outlook was
essentially unscientific. In matters of unimportant detail he was a
martinet of an extremely exasperating type. Being what he was, and not
being what he wasn't, Kent found his domineering fussiness and his
social cowardice hotly resented by the eighty highly trained men under
his alleged control. But, as he was the chosen of the trustees, the
scientists of the Foundation had to grin and bear him. In all fairness
to Kent it must be admitted that he was highly efficient in the
particular task for which the trustees had picked him. This was the
rather ticklish job of coaxing superfluous cash from retired
millionaires, who nervously foresaw their rapidly approaching passage
through the needle's eye mentioned in Scripture.
The eighty under Kent's nominal kingship treated their malevolent
despot with a mixture of amusement and contempt. As the least of them
had three or four times the ingenuity and imagination that Kent could
claim, they made of his life a very creditable imitation of hell.
Baiting Kent became the favorite pastime of their idler moments. When
research palled, these misguided men would put one of their number up
to making some perfectly outrageous demand of the harassed director.
Then, when Kent naturally refused, the petitioner would indignantly
"resign". This always brought Kent to his knees instantly. To go
before the trustees and admit that the Erickson Foundation was not a
cooing dovecote of high-minded scientists, who were toiling only for
the good of humanity under their director's brooding benevolence, was
more than the poor man could face. Harmony and cooperation, service
and uplifting self-sacrifice being the director's official slogan, he
dared not confess that "his" men were a thoroughly human lot, with all
the self-interest of the average man, and a perfect genius for making
themselves, on occasion, as irritating as a pack of discontented devils.
In spite of his tactlessness and his aggressive stupidity, Kent had one
feature--if it can be called that--which redeemed him almost completely
in the eyes of his subordinates. His nineteen-year-old daughter Alice,
fair-haired, violet-eyed and altogether wholesome with her keen sense
of humor, was adored by every man on the staff, from the tottering De
Vries, seventy years old, but still with the mind of a man of forty, to
the gangling youths fresh from the university.
But for the alluring Alice, it is doubtful whether a single member of
the staff would ever have attended the tiresome teas and deadly dinners
which Kent imagined it his official duty to inflict on his imagined
slaves. Even a funeral or a college commencement, they agreed, would
have been lively with Alice as hostess. Kent, for his part, worshiped
her from heels to hair. It was rather pathetic to see the jealous care
with which he hovered about her when some attractive young man seemed
to be getting on too fast in her affections. The husband of Alice, if
poor, futile Kent could choose him for her, would be so impossibly
perfect as to be a mere platonic ideal. He secretly hoped that her
disconcerting sense of humor would keep her a spinstress, at least
until he was a handful of ashes in a white jar.
On entering the holy of holies, Brown found Kent and Crane glowering at
each other across the broad expanse of a mahogany table that looked
almost as if it were not veneer. Sensing that the interview was now at
the resignation point so far as it concerned Crane, the doctor made a
motion to withdraw, but Crane irritably motioned him to a chair.
"There's nothing private," he announced. "Mr. Kent and I have been
discussing Bork's suicide. I'll be ready for your experiment in a
moment--if Mr. Kent doesn't force me to resign."
"Bork's suicide?" the doctor echoed.
"Yes. Last night. It's the ethics of the situation that are worrying
Mr. Kent and me. I see it one way; he, another."
"You might compromise," Brown suggested.
"Precisely," Kent took him up eagerly. "We must cooperate. Doctor
Crane refuses to see the absolute justice of my stand."
"If he did," Brown smiled, "he would have to surrender, wouldn't he? I
shouldn't call that much of a compromise. It takes two to dispose of
cold crow, you know--one to dress it, the other to eat it. Who is the
chef in this instance?"
Crane's long jaw set obstinately.
"I am," he assented defiantly. "Mr. Kent insists that the good name of
the Foundation be preserved at all costs--even that of common decency
to a dead man, who, naturally, can't speak in his own defense."
"Excuse me a moment," Brown interrupted, "but aren't you beginning to
itch again? You see," he continued, turning to the glowering Kent,
"Doctor Crane is rather irritable today. By working around his two
million volt tube without even the precautions of common sense, he has
got his skin and his temper into a very ticklish condition. Nothing
serious, of course; merely hard on the disposition. So you will pardon
his rudeness," the doctor concluded with a disarming smile, "if he
forgets himself. Very well, Doctor Crane, go on; sorry I interrupted."
"Mr. Kent has been listening to a lot of old wives' gossip. Somehow it
had got around that Bork was a soak. Can you prove it, Mr. Kent? No?
Well, then shut up. I mean exactly what I say," Crane continued,
lashing himself into a passion and entirely disregarding the doctor's
warning look. "If you dare to give the papers any such scandalous lie
about Bork, I'll give them a better one about how you run this
Foundation. You're not going to throw mud all over a dead man's name
just to save what you think is the honor--it hasn't any--of this
corporation. All the Erickson Foundation gives a damn about is the
patents it gets out of its employees for the nominal fee of one
dollar--and you know it. There is no question of ethics here. You
have none, the Foundation hasn't any, and I don't know what the word
means. Get the point? The best man--or the biggest crook--wins.
That's all. This time I win; you lost. You give it out to the papers
that Bork was temporarily insane from a nervous breakdown, or I'll
resign and tell the yellow rags why."
Crane had gone too far. His itching skin had betrayed him into a
complete statement of the contempt--justified, perhaps--in which he
held his job, the director, and the canny corporation for which he
worked.
"This," said Kent in a cold rage, "is insubordination. I would be
quite justified in recommending your instant dismissal."
Crane gave a short, contemptuous laugh.
"What do I care for your silly job? I can get a better one tomorrow.
You know as well as I do that I'm the best X-ray man in the country.
You see, I'm not fainting from false modesty. Call in your
stenographer and dictate that letter to the papers. Otherwise you can
have my resignation here and now."
"You heard him," Kent exploded, turning to the doctor. "Is that a
proper way for a subordinate to address his superior? I shall report
him to the trustees. You are my witness."
"'Superior' be damned," Crane cut in before Brown could attempt to
restore diplomatic relations. "Are you going to dictate that letter to
the press? Yes or no?"
"No," Kent snapped. But it was a half-hearted snap, such as an aged
and ailing turtle might have given his persecutor.
"Then I resign," Crane announced, rising to his feet. "Explain why to
your precious trustees. If you don't, I will."
"Sit down," the doctor commanded sharply. "You are both making fools
of yourselves. The only excuse for you, Crane, is that you have let a
little itching get the better of your temper. I know personally," the
doctor continued, turning to the enraged director, "that Doctor Crane
has the very highest regard for you personally and for your amazing
success in running the Foundation. Can you afford to lose such a
man--your most loyal collaborator? You know you can't. Why not
compromise? Crane agrees to stay in exchange for a short statement
from you to the press clearing Bork's name. Bork, I gather, has
committed suicide in a fit of insanity brought on by overwork. Why not
state the simple fact plainly, Mr. Kent? It is no reflection on the
Foundation or on your policies. Hundreds of men work themselves to
death every year in the United States alone. And why not? It's better
than ossifying."
Kent glared at Crane, a hard, newborn hatred such as he had never
before experienced toward his "subordinate" wrestling with his common
sense. The thought that Alice seemed to prefer this lank, outspoken
Texan with the uncompromising jaw to any of the other younger men on
the staff, but added more fuel to Kent's cold, smouldering rage. By
openly defying his nominal superior, and showing him up in the presence
of a third party for the overstuffed effigy which he was, Crane had
earned the director's lifelong enmity. Doctor Brown, mistakenly
inferring from the director's expressionless face that the storm was
over, managed to wink at Crane unobserved by Kent.
"I withdraw my resignation," Crane mumbled, rightly interpreting the
doctor's wink.
Kent apparently swallowed the bait--again as usual. The magnanimous
director rose from his swivel chair and walked clear round the table to
extend to the contrite Crane the manly hand of forgiveness.
"And I," he promised with pompous solemnity, "will give the papers the
simple truth that Neils Bork died a martyr to science, betrayed to
death by his own zeal in the service of knowledge and the pursuit of
truth." The director inflated his chest, and Crane smothered a grin.
"As you have well said, Doctor Brown," he continued proudly, "the
shoulders of the Erickson Foundation are broad enough and strong
enough, to support the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth."
Feeling that the honorable director was, after all rather a slippery
mackerel, the conspirators deferred their departure until Crane had the
meticulously dictated lie to the press firmly in his competent right
hand. As a further proof of their sound appreciation of the good faith
of the born administrator, they lingered until the message was safely
delivered to an eager reporter summoned by telephone. Then, and then
only, did they venture to take their respectful leave.
"And to think," Crane remarked viciously, as the massive door of the
inner sanctum closed noiselessly behind them, "that he is the father of
Alice. It's impossible."
"Heredity is a theory," Brown admitted, "in this case, any way, and
environment an illusion. The Kent family alone would disprove half of
our biological guesses. And I'm going to take a crack at the other
half."
To Crane's wondering eyes the doctor complacently exhibited six large,
clean hen's eggs.
"Here's my apparatus. You have heard of Watson's experiments with
fruit flies? Well, I'm going to try something similar. Flies don't
prove very much for human beings. Hens are nearer our own kind."
"But a hen is essentially a reptile," Crane objected vaguely, as some
shadowy reminiscence of his high school biology flitted across his
electrical mind. "Birds came from snakes, didn't they? And we
branched off from monkeys."
"Go far enough back," Brown suggested lightly, "and you'll find our
common ancestor where the mammals sprang from the effete reptiles. No
matter how far back you look--provided you stop within a few ages of
the protozoa, you won't find any of our cousins among the insects. We
may not resemble hens very closely, but we are more like fowls than we
are like flies. Watson's work was great as a beginning. It was
tremendous. He discovered a new world. I want to take the next
obvious step. Is your tube working all right?"
"It was when we quit yesterday," Crane replied, inserting his key in
the lock of the green steel door. "What an awful smell! Do you get
it?"
Brown sniffed critically.
"That's organic matter decaying. I should say--"
What he was about to add remained unsaid. A terrific odor gushed out
at them, beating back their feeble assault upon the pitch darkness of
the laboratory. Not to be defeated by a mere smell, Crane flung a flap
of his coat over his nose and mouth, and groped desperately for the
switch controlling the floodlights. The switch clicked its futile
message.
"Dead," Crane exclaimed, referring to the lights.
"Check," Brown muttered through his handkerchief, imagining that Crane
referred to the overpowering reek. "This is more than organic decay.
Don't you get metallic taste as well?"
Brown's further observations were strangled in an involuntary croak of
instinctive horror. He had followed Crane along the palpitating
darkness of the steel gallery of the switches when suddenly, from the
sheer blackness above him, eight clammy "arms", colder than the black
death and slimier than a decaying tangle of kelps, descended upon his
head, chest and shoulders in a loathsome embrace. Instantly he was out
of the laboratory, struggling like a madman to free himself from that
frigid abomination adhering to the upper part of his body with all the
chill tenacity of a dead octopus. Crane followed, shaking from head to
foot.
Once in the glaring sunlight, the horrified men saw in a flash what had
descended upon the doctor. Crane tugged it from the doctor's shoulders
and hurled it away with a shudder of disgust. It was a hideous knot of
eight smooth, slimy black legs, each about four feet long, still
adhering crazily to the tattered fragment of a huge black thorax on
which the dull red imprint of an "hour glass" was plainly visible. The
rest of the monster's body had already evaporated in foul decay.
In petrified fear they stood staring at the remains of this unspeakable
abomination which seemed to contradict nature, but which in reality
merely emphasized her commonest manifestation. The enormous size of
those obscene legs was no more than the natural outcome of the sudden
overthrow of a delicate balance holding normal growth in check.
Destruction of certain glands in the human body, or misguided tampering
with their perfectly adjusted excretions, might well result in a
corresponding monstrosity of a man. What had suddenly shattered the
mechanism of control in this instance? Neither man could guess,
although Brown might have suspected, had he known the details of Bork's
attempted suicide.
The full sunlight had a horrifying effect on the remains. First the
smooth black legs swelled slightly, as it filled with an expanding gas.
The crushed legs then stiffened and straightened slightly under the
increased pressure, and the skin tightened. Was that horrible fragment
trying to live and walk? The pressure increased, and the legs began to
glisten as if recovering their vitality. Then the joints of all
cracked simultaneously; the eight black husks collapsed under the
escaping gas, and all rapidly withered, wrinkling in black decay, like
the skin of a perfectly embalmed mummy suddenly exposed to the light
and air after centuries in the cold darkness of its hermetic tomb.
Within ten seconds only a tangled knot of shriveled wisps of skin
remained.
"Did you see it?" they panted together.
The two men stared into one another's faces.
"I don't believe it happened," Crane muttered. "We're both crazy."
"But the smell? It's still pouring out of that door. We must see what
is in there."
"Not without a light. I'll lock the door and leave you on guard. If
anyone wants to get in tell them we have an experiment going, and say I
asked that everybody keep out for twenty-four hours."
With shaking hands Crane locked the door and hurried off to the
workshops. In ten minutes he was back, trundling an oxy-acetylene
blowpipe with four cylinders of gas, half a dozen globes for the
floodlights, and two electric torches. He had recovered sufficiently
to minimize the danger.
"I thought we might want to clean up after we've seen what there is to
see," he grinned, pointing to the blowpipe. "This will throw a
four-foot jet of flame hot enough to scorch the devil himself. How are
your nerves? The walk did mine good. After all there must be some
simple explanation for whatever has happened. Anything that can be
explained is nothing to be afraid of. Well, are you ready? We shall
have to stand the smell."
While Brown played one flashlight on the lintel of the steel door and
spotted the other on the path that Crane must take through the
darkness, the latter set his jaw and rolled the truck with the blowpipe
up to the gallery of the switches. Then he hastily locked the door and
left his key in the lock. The odor had decreased somewhat, owing to
the partial airing the laboratory had received while the men stood
viewing the dissolution of at least one of the dead enemy, but it was
still foul enough. Tying their handkerchiefs over the lower part of
their faces, the two set grimly to work.
Their first tentative moves were slow and cautious. Although the state
of the air seemed to prove that no living thing yet lurked in the
darkness, they did not rashly tempt death. Armed with the identical
slat of white pine which Bork had used in his blundering attempt to
electrocute himself, Crane cleared a path four feet broad while Brown
played the flashlights on the hideous things in his companion's way.
In all sizes and twisted shapes of death, from balls of black legs no
bigger than a rat to contorted monstrosities like enormous jet black
spider crabs, the rapidly decaying victims of their own uncontrolled
vitality cluttered every yard of steel galleries and cement floors, and
depended in loathsome festoons from every railing.
A sudden thud in the darkness to their left, followed by a dry rustle,
brought both men to an instant halt, their skins tingling with an
unnatural fear. Sweeping his flashlight up to the ceiling. Brown saw
what had happened. From every steel girder hundreds of the dead enemy
hung in precarious equilibrium. Now and then one swayed slightly, its
unstable balance shifting under the rapid progress of a ravenous decay
that devoured the softer parts of the enormous body with incredible
speed, and tilted the harder remnant of legs and carapace a
hair-breadth downward toward the inevitable fall. Underfoot a thick,
slippery scum of innumerable black bodies, from the size of wheat
grains to mere specks barely visible, marked the sudden slaughter of a
self-perpetuating host extinguished in the very act of seizing upon
unnatural life.
How had they lived? On what had they fed? The long evil legs were
mere distended sacs of skin filled with foul air. Had they swelled to
their terrifying dimensions by assimilating the gases of the atmosphere
and transmuting the dust particles of the air into the tenuous
substance of their skins? It seemed incredible; yet for the moment, no
other explanation even faintly rational suggested itself. Presently
Crane turned over two enormous black husks still intertwined in their
death embrace. The hollow black fangs of each were sunk deep into the
hard thorax of the other. Their first sustenance--whatever may have
been its nature--dissipated, the starving brutes had devoured one
another.
"I killed a black widow in here yesterday," Crane remarked in a
strained voice. "Or was it a thousand years ago? There must be some
connection between that one and these. The mark of the red hour glass
is on at least half of them. Those without it are the males. Look at
those two--the bigger one has the hour glass, the other hasn't. The
big one was the female; the other her mate. When she began starving to
death, she tried to eat him, only he got his fangs into her, too. Then
they both died. Does what I did yesterday explain this nightmare?
You're something of a biologist; you ought to have a theory."
"I have," Brown admitted, "but it is worse than this nightmare. Don't
go up that ladder. Some of them may still be alive."
Disregarding the doctor's horrified protests, Crane began climbing the
vertical steel ladder against the side wall.
"Throw the light up ahead of me," he directed, pitching off two
dangling carcasses from the fifth rung. "I've got to get up to the
floodlights and stick in some new globes. Two will do."
He made his perilous way up to the steel girders, kicked a footway free
for himself along the broadest, and coolly inserted a new light globe.
As he screwed home the bulb, the light flashed on, revealing for the
first time the full horror of that black shambles like a madman's dream
of hell. Brown vented an involuntary shout, and Crane for a moment
tottered as if about to lose his balance. Recovering, he walked coolly
along the cross girder and screwed in the second bulb, about fifty feet
from the second and directly over the pit of the transformers.
"Is that enough light?" he called down.
"Too much. I mean, I don't want to see it."
"You've got to, until we clean up this mess from floor to ceiling.
While I'm up here, I might as well clear the rafters. You get a board
and begin sweeping them into piles. There's a broom in the janitor's
cupboard over there to the left."
For ten horrible hours they toiled in the noisome air of that nightmare
tomb, sweeping the twisted black abominations into stacks, and applying
the fierce white jet of the oxy-acetylene torch to each the moment it
was ready. Nor did they neglect to spray the withering fire over every
inch of the concrete floor. Some spark of vitality might still linger
in the fine black sand of innumerable eggs, that had burst like
capsules of ripe poppy seed from the bodies of the dead females.
At last, shortly after two in the morning, their gruesome task came to
an end. Both men were sick from the nauseating fumes, and exhausted by
their protracted battle with an enemy that had defied nature only to
expire hideously.
"I dare not go to bed with that still in my eyes," Brown confessed.
"Nor I," Crane admitted. "Let's take a long walk and blow our lungs
clean."
"That suits me. By the way, how is your skin?"
"Itching again. But I can stand it till morning. Anything would be
bearable after that nightmare."
They emerged into the cool night air and filled their lungs.
"I never knew that air could taste like this," Brown sighed, exhaling
and breathing deeply again. "Aren't you going to lock the door?"
"No. For once I'm going to break Kent's pet rule. This place must
smell clean by morning."
"What about your tube? Somebody may come and tamper with it."
"That's so," Crane agreed. "Perhaps I had better lock up."
He reentered the laboratory and turned on the lights.
"The tube's gone!" he shouted. So engrossed had he been in the
business of destroying the enemy that until this moment he had not
noticed his loss. "There's nothing left of it but the concrete stand."
Brown followed him down the steel stairs to investigate. They found
nothing that threw any light on the mysterious disappearance of the
two-million-volt tube. Only a vitrified white patch on the flat top of
the concrete stand hinted at some unusual disaster. An outgush of
transcendent heat had fused the concrete into a glassy pillar.
Glancing up, Crane saw the melted remnants of the connecting wires
dangling from their support.
"Short circuited by some fool's carelessness," he muttered. "Whose?"
"Bork's?" the doctor suggested. "He would be the only man likely to
experiment with your tube. None of the others have worked with it,
have they?"
"No. Bork was the only man beside myself who ever touched it. If he
did this, it was deliberate. No wonder he committed suicide. Probably
he meant just to set me back a month or two and blew out the whole
thing. Bork was always a bungler. This is what I get for trying to
make a man out of a fool."
They retraced their steps to the gallery of the switches.
"Look at that," Crane exclaimed, pointing to the long row of ebony
handles pressed securely home. "He short circuited the whole battery
of transformers, too. It will take a month to repair that fool's
damage. He must have been drunker than usual. Then he committed
suicide to escape going to the penitentiary. Well, he did one sensible
thing in his life."
"What will you tell Kent now?" the doctor asked as they again emerged
into the fresh air, leaving the door wide open. "Will you still stick
up for Bork?"
"Why not? Calling him what he was won't restore my tube. And I
shouldn't care if it did. Tomorrow I begin work on the twenty million
volt tube. Someone will find the door open in the morning and report
the damage to Kent. Then the papers will theorize that some enemy of
the Foundation stole a key to the laboratory and did ten thousand
dollars worth of damage at one swipe. I'll not contradict them.":
They walked till sunrise, trying to purge their eyes and minds of the
night's horror. The disappearance of the tube gave Brown a further
clue to the mystery, but he did not confide it to Crane. Until he
could learn more of the action of extremely short waves on living
tissue he would keep his daring hypotheses to himself. In the meantime
there was one simple check which he could easily apply.
Just as they sat down for coffee at an all-night lunch counter, Brown
had a sudden thought which filled him with alarm.
"What did you do with the water in the bathtub after I left?"
"Let it down the drain, of course," Crane replied. "What else was
there to do?"
"Nothing, I suppose," Brown admitted. "Only I wish you hadn't. It's
probably diffusing into the water of the bay by now."
"You got a whole bottleful," Crane reminded him. "Wasn't that enough?"
"Plenty," the doctor muttered.
On reaching his house, the doctor carefully packed the bottle of water
in his black bag and hurried with it to call on one of his friends,
Professor Wilkes, a specialist at the university in the protozoa.
Wilkes was one of those fairly venerable scientists who live on the
reputations of their prime, do nothing, and look down their noses at
younger, more aggressive investigators who accomplish something. His
air was that of a once-nimble sand flea soured by experience; his once
flaming hair had gone dull reddish streaked with gray, and his lean,
angular body was a habitual protest against the
radicalism--scientific--of the younger generation. The professor was
just sitting down to breakfast when Brown burst in on him.
"Check me up on this, will you?" he began without preliminaries of any
kind. "Either I'm losing my mind or this water Is alive with
microscopic protozoa new to biology. Until last night I wasn't sure of
my guess--I searched all the books, but wasn't convinced by not finding
any of these described. I might have overlooked known species
mentioned only in out-of-the-way papers. Last night settled it. These
things _must_ be new--to the extent at least of being radical mutations
from known species. Their life cycle is different from anything yet
described."
With a curious glance at his friend's face, Professor Wilkes abandoned
his breakfast, gravely took the bottle of water, and preceded Brown
into the study. Having carefully prepared a slide with a drop of the
miraculous water, he then applied his eye to the lens and slowly
adjusted the focus. For a full minute there was a tense silence,
broken only by Brown's unsuccessful efforts to breathe naturally. At
last the professor glanced up.
"Are you sure you have brought me the right sample?"
"Positive. Aren't they new species?"
"Look for yourself," the professor invited, rising and making way for
his excited friend.
One look was enough for Brown. With a short exclamation he
straightened up and rubbed his eyes.
"Have I dreamt it all?"
"Probably," Wilkes remarked drily. "Alter the focus to suit yourself.
Take a good, steady look."
Brown did so, peering into the tiny speck of moisture which concealed
his imagined discovery. In silence he prepared half a dozen slides and
subjected them to the same pitiless scrutiny.
"I was mistaken," he grudgingly admitted at last. "That water is
completely sterile. Unnaturally sterile," he added after an awkward
pause, in which he reddened uncomfortably under the professor's
sympathetic regard. "There's not a trace of organic matter in it."
"You boiled and filtered it through porcelain?" Wilkes suggested kindly.
"If so, I don't recall having done so. In fact, I'm certain I did not."
"Perhaps your protozoa all dissolved of themselves," the professor
hinted, with just a trace of sarcasm.
"Could these dissolve?" Brown demanded, suddenly exhibiting a sheaf of
the drawings he had made.
The professor silently took the sketches and stood shuffling them
through his long fingers, occasionally pausing with a faint smile to
admire the imaginative beauty of some particularly exotic "animal".
Without a word he handed them back. His manner plainly intimated that
the interview, so far as it concerned him, was at an end.
"You think I never saw the originals of those?" Brown protested.
"My dear doctor, I think nothing whatever about them. My advice to you
is to go home, go to bed, and stay there for a week. You have been
over-exerting your mind."
Brown restored the despised sketches to his pocket.
"Would you ask one of your colleagues in the department of chemistry to
analyze the water in this bottle if I leave it?"
The professor agreed good-naturedly, and Brown left him to finish his
belated breakfast. The moment his eccentric visitor was safely down
the steps, Wilkes carried the mysterious bottle into the kitchen,
thoughtfully extracted the cork, and poured the contents down the sink.
"Mad as a hatter," he remarked. "Poor Brown! It's a blessing he has
no wife."
Crane was just about to retire after a thorough disinfecting when the
telephone rang. It was Brown.
"We actually did all that last night?" the doctor inquired.
"I don't know what you mean by 'that', but I can guess. We did, if you
have in mind what I have."
"Is it anything about spiders?"
"You might call them that."
"So it was real?"
"Real? I'll say it was. Until you loosen up and explain how it could
ever happen, I'm going to think of it as the black widow's revenge.
You said it fitted some theory of your own. Come over this afternoon
and save my mind. I'll need you."
"Who is going to take care of me?" Brown demanded. "All that we did
last night is nothing to what I've just done. I've proved myself a
hopeless lunatic to the worst old gossip on the university faculty. It
will be all over town by tonight."
Crane chuckled.
"We did such a thorough job in cleaning up that nobody will ever
believe a word we say, If we let the least hint escape. You won't
catch me letting it out. Better follow my example and sleep it off."
"I will, as soon as I have given Bertha her breakfast. By the way,
what is the proper thing to feed a hen in the morning?"
"Spiders."
Chapter Five--_HIS JOKE_
From the moment the librarian left De Soto alone with the electrical
books till eleven o'clock at night, when the closing bell rang, the new
man concentrated every ounce of his tremendous vitality on his
self-appointed task. Had he been told that human beings--except a few
of the most highly gifted--master the printed page a line or a
paragraph at a time, he would have laughed incredulously. He himself
had "always" digested the information in books by turning their pages
as fast as his nimble fingers would let him, and taking in each page at
a glance.
The first books, purely descriptive, that he photographed in this
manner on his mind, irritated him almost beyond endurance. Why did the
writers go to such tedious length to state what was trivially obvious?
De Soto began to conceive a mild contempt for the science of
electricity as expounded in college texts and popular treatises. In
some indefinable way it all seemed an old legend dimly remembered from
a forgotten life. The rudimentary knowledge of the universal forces of
nature was as instinctive in him as breathing.
It was only with the thirtieth book hastily sampled that De Soto's
naive conceit received a salutary check. He had just flashed through
the massive bulk of Faraday's monumental "Experimental Researches",
marveling at the man's painstaking labor to expound the obvious, when
he encountered a new language, written in bizarre symbols, of which he
could make out nothing. Exasperated by his failure to understand the
writer's hieroglyphics, he glanced at the back of the cover to learn
the author's name. It was Clerk Maxwell, and the title of the treatise
was "Electricity and Magnetism, Vol. 1." De Soto rose from the table
and went in search of the reference librarian. She greeted him at her
desk with a welcoming smile.
"Are you finding what you want?"
"Some of it. Can you tell me what language this is?"
She glanced at the beautifully printed page and laughed.
"Higher mathematics, I should judge from its appearance."
"Have you any books on this sort of thing?"
"Several hundred. I'll show you where they are."
She left him to his own devices in a stack of shelf upon shelf of
assorted mathematics, from beginners' arithmetics to appalling tomes on
mathematical physics that were consulted, on the average, perhaps, once
in two years.
"Do I have to read all these?" he muttered, turning the diagrammed
pages of a descriptive geometry. "More stuff that need never have been
printed. Why do they write it? Couldn't an idiot see that this is all
so?"
In spite of himself, as he worked his lightning way steadily through
modern higher algebra, analytic geometry, the calculus, and the theory
of functions of real and complex variables, he began to become
interested. Here at last was the simple, adequate language of nature
herself. It was terse and luminously expressive in a highly suggestive
way--unlike the ton or so of solid prose he had already digested
against his will. What the italicized theorems left unsaid frequently
expressed more than they purported to tell. De Soto found his own
intelligence leaping ahead of the printed formulas, and revelling in
the automatic interplay of the concepts their brevity suggested.
Gradually a strange, new light dawned on him. This beautiful language
after all was but another shovelful of unnecessary dust thrown up by
clumsy workers between themselves and nature. Why go to all this fuss
to torture and disguise the obvious? Why not look ahead, and in one
swift glance see the beginning and the end of every laborious,
unnecessary demonstration, as but different aspects of one self-evident
truth? All these imposing regiments of equations and diagrams, that
marched and counter-marched endlessly through book after book, were
merely the fickle mercenaries of men too indolent to win their own
battles.
"The world must be full of idiots," De Soto sighed simply, putting back
a profound treatise on the partial differential equations of physics.
"Has it always been so? I can't seem to remember a time when I didn't
know all this stuff by instinct. Still, as I have to live in the
world, I must learn to speak its silly language."
There was nothing miraculous about De Soto's performance. A profound
physical change in the structure of every cell in his body had
accelerated his rate of living--or at least of thinking and
perceiving--many thousandfold beyond that of any human being that has
yet been evolved. He had not waited for evolution. A million years
hence the whole race will no doubt have passed the point which he, by a
blundering accident, attained in the billionth of a second. Whether
language, mathematical or other, will survive to plague our descendants
of the year 1,000,000, is doubtful. These feeble aids will have become
as useless as the meaningless magic of our remote ancestors. De Soto
was but a partial, accidental anticipation of the more sophisticated
and yet more natural race into which time and the secular flux of
chance are slowly transforming our kind. Viewing the vast
accumulations of lore which he had absorbed and spontaneously outgrown,
De Soto felt old and depressed. What could he do in a world that still
tripped itself at every step on its swaddling clothes? Although he did
not realize what he was, he felt a chilling sense of poverty and
isolation. Sobered in his exultant vitality, he turned slowly back to
resume his pursuit of the mysteries of matter. He began where he had
left off, with Maxwell's treatise.
"Wrong, at bottom, every last one of them," was his somewhat
presumptuous verdict as he closed the last, a modern masterpiece on
theories of quanta and radiation. "Why will they not see what stares
them in the face? The universe lies all about them, everywhere, and
like impossible contortionists in an insane circus they succeeded in
turning their back on all quarters of it at once."
It was no harsher a verdict than many a man of science would pass today
on the science of the Greeks, or even on that of three centuries ago.
Are we as blind as De Soto imagined?
"What can I do?" he asked aloud. "If these are the problems they try
to solve, how will they ever understand a real one?"
The jangle of the closing bell cut short his gloomy meditations, and he
walked slowly out of the building. The crisp night air brought the
blood tingling to his cheeks and forehead in a surge of stimulated
vitality. Immediately he felt young again, and walked briskly down the
brightly lighted boulevard leading to the civic center. The tide of
night traffic brought some all but extinct memory of a former existence
into momentary life. For one awful second he doubted his identity.
"Who am I?" he gasped, stopping abruptly before the plate glass window
of a soda palace. "Am I insane?"
He caught his own reflection in one of the decorative mirrors of the
window. It stared back at him, ruddy-lipped, swarthy-skinned,
black-eyed and, above all, young with an air of perpetual youth.
"That is not my face," he muttered. "I was never like that. His hair
is jet black. Mine is--." He stopped, unable to continue. "That
man," he whispered, "is looking back on me from the farthest side of a
grave where I was buried a million years ago--or where I am to be
buried a million years hence. It is all the same. I am dead and
buried, and yet I live."
The 'lost' feeling dispersed as quickly and as mysteriously as it had
come. De Soto turned from the window and walked with springy step
toward a small park. Although it was now nearly twenty-four hours
since he had tasted food, he experienced no hunger. He did, however,
feel the need of sleep. Where should he lie down and rest? A glance
at the unfathomable vault of the sapphire sky, ablaze with steady
stars, convinced him that even the airiest room on such a night would
be intolerably stuffy. His problem solved itself. A vacant bench
under a fragrant chestnut tree, whose leaves rustled mysteriously in
the soft breeze, invited him to rest. In five minutes he was fast
asleep.
De Soto slept about four hours, an even, dreamless sleep of complete
refreshment. Waking fully and instantly shortly after four o'clock, he
felt alive with energy and ready for a long day's work. It was still
dark, without a hint of the coming dawn. The library would not open
for nearly five hours yet. Suddenly De Soto realized that the library
was not his goal, and never would be again. Of what value were all its
dusty mountains of dead knowledge? He had mastered the best of its
scientific offerings. If the rest--literature, philosophy, and
art--was of no greater merit relatively than the cream of the science,
it would not interest him. It was not worth inspecting. All of it
must be like the science--the first awkward effort of a race, that had
discovered its mind but yesterday, trying to grasp the meaning of life,
and failing ludicrously in the attempt. Libraries and all they
signified belonged definitely to his irrevocable past--the gray age of
a million years ago.
Hunger asserting itself, he arose to seek a clean eating place.
Only the cook and one waiter were on duty. Neither gave him more than
a casual inspection as he entered, for both were servants to the core
without one spark of imagination to lighten their completely bovine
lives. To such human beings all others appear as listless as
themselves. The food was well cooked and neatly served. On these
scores there was no complaint. Nevertheless, as De Soto sat sipping
his final glass of water, he experienced a vague feeling of discontent.
What had aroused his indolent animosity? Chancing to meet the waiter's
eyes, he knew. It was the waiter and the cook.
"A pair of mistakes," he thought to himself. "What does either get out
of life? They might as well be vegetables. Neither has any interest
in his work or in his life. Why don't they do something different? Or
why," he thought grimly after a moment's reflection, "don't they hang
themselves? The cooks, the waiters, the manager and all at that place
yesterday morning were different. They were alive, and enjoyed
life--in their own way. But still they were enjoying it. That is the
great point. These two are dead and lack the genius to wish they were
buried."
Without tipping the moribund waiter, De Soto paid his bill and left the
place in disgust. His harsh judgment on the sad-eyed waiter and the
harmless, bored cook was of a piece with his estimate of modern physics.
Not only mentally but also physically De Soto was an entirely different
being from the stupid, unhealthy Bork in whom he had originated. It is
therefore no exaggeration to say that De Soto was only about
twenty-four hours old when he left the discouraged cook and waiter, and
stepped out into the cool, bracing air of the early morning. In
appearance he was a strikingly handsome youth of twenty, with almost a
preternatural intelligence shining from his black eyes and glowing from
every feature. There was, however, a haunting 'something' about his
whole expression which contradicted his vivid youthfulness. An elusive
seriousness belied the faintly smiling lips, and a still less tangible
shadow of extreme old age lurked behind the light shining from his
eyes. It was as if he had seen everything that life on this planet
will have to offer for the next ten thousand centuries and, having seen
it, was ironically disillusioned by its meaningless futility. Another
man having had a similar vision might have been lifted to ecstasy over
the lightning progress of the human race; not so De Soto. It was
merely a matter of temperament; the dead Bork had not been completely
burned out of the living man.
"What shall I do?" he pondered, as his rapid stride hurried him through
the darkness. "Is anything worth doing in a world like this? If
everything seems stale to me, how can I make it appear fresh and
desirable to others? There are too many of them--millions and millions
and millions like that cook and waiter. They take everything and give
nothing. Give them nothing and they ask for nothing, provided they be
permitted to exist. Why permit them?" he continued coldly. Then,
after a long blank in which he neither thought nor felt, his lips
silently framed the unanswerable question, "Why should any human beings
live?" The obvious retort flashed into his mind, "because they can and
because they do." That, however, was not an answer to the 'why' as he
meant it. His purpose was taking shape. Before many hours he was to
decide what he should do with his inexhaustible health and his
boundless talent. Rather, the transformed cells of his body were to
decide.
He stopped abruptly in his walk, hypnotized by the strange familiarity
of a massive, rectangular building which loomed up forbiddingly before
him in the graying darkness. Where had he seen such a building before?
As if threading the shadowy mazes of a previous existence in a dream,
he stole toward a sharp oblong of sheer black on the dimly visible
wall. The door was open. Before he realized what he was doing, he had
entered and turned the switch of the floodlights.
"Where have I seen this place before?" he muttered staring down into
the pit of transformers. Another memory struggled up from the wreckage
of lost associations, but he could not place it. "There should be
twelve lights up there, not only two."
His feet urged him to descend the steel stairway to the pit. The
gigantic gray devils towering up on their rigid legs were familiar
enough in a subtle way; he had seen pictures of similar monsters in the
books at the library. Intuitively and from his comprehensive reading
he knew immediately their evil powers and their uses.
"These are unnecessarily big and complicated," he remarked aloud, as if
giving his considered estimate to some attentive listener. "Don't you
see that you could build a single, compact one to do all that these
forty can? All you need--" He launched into a rapid description,
bristling with technicalities, of what was necessary for his projected
improvements. For an hour and a half he roamed through the laboratory,
examining every piece of apparatus, criticizing and contemptuously
condemning each in turn. "A hopeless bungle," was his final comment as
he ascended the stairs to the gallery of the switches.
Daylight was now streaming coldly in through the open door. De Soto
walked to the switch to turn off the lights. The main switchboard
controlling the transformers caught his eye, and he noted that the long
row of ebonite handles were all down as far as they would go. This was
no condition to leave switchboard in, no matter if it was "dead."
As he opened the switches, his vision included the long bench beneath
them. An empty cigar box lay open on the bench. De Soto picked it up,
turned it over and over in his hands and finally set it down, his mind
vaguely unsatisfied. It recalled nothing to him. Yet he had a chilly
feeling that some incident connected with that box had marked the
turning point of his life.
With a sigh he left the laboratory.
"Where was I born?" he pondered, gazing up at the golden flush which
presaged the rising sun. "When? Was it in Buenos Aires, as I told
that woman in the library? How strange that I should have forgotten
everything of my early life! This is what they call amnesia, I
suppose. Well, what does it matter so long as I know who I am now?
Yes, I must have forgotten."
A neat inscription, over the entrance to the building opposite him
announced that this was the Erickson Foundation for Electrical Research.
"This is where I intended to ask for work," he remembered, as from a
past inconceivably remote. Between this dawning day and its yesterday,
when he had scanned almost in a glance the sum total of existing
physical knowledge, lay an eternity in his maturing mind. The
twenty-four hours had aged him so that he looked back on his
yesterday's ambition as the uninformed dream of an eager child.
Although he knew better now than to pursue his childish
purpose--whatever it may have been--he adhered to his plan of working
at the Foundation. Already his initial intention was half forgotten;
his new purpose, he thought would at least help him to pass the time.
While De Soto was walking off his depression, Brown was endeavoring to
sleep. All he achieved was a fitful nightmare till about ten o'clock
in the morning. Giving up the attempt, he rose and made a deliberate
effort to resume his normal habits.
The morning paper was rather duller than usual, and Brown was just
about to discard it in favor the "Biological Review," when an
unobtrusive paragraph on the last page caught his eye. "Fishermen
report strange malady," the caption ran. The fish, Brown learned on
reading the article, not fishermen, were the sufferers. Moreover, only
salt water fish were affected. The disease manifested itself in
discolored blotches of all hues--blue, green, yellow, purple and
red--on the skin and fins. The flesh seemed as firm and sound as ever.
Probably, the report stated, the discolorations were harmless.
"Perhaps," Brown agreed, cutting out the paragraph. "More probably
they are not. This must be looked into by the Board of Health. If the
fish trust thinks it can get away with anything like this, it is badly
mistaken. That story should have been printed on the front page."
A short conversation over the telephone set the appropriate machinery
into instant motion. The Chief of Health promised to send out his
squads at once to seize and destroy all spotted fish exposed for sale.
"That settles that," Brown remarked, picking up the "Biological
Review." But was it settled? Only salt water fish were being
affected. The doctor extracted the sketches of his despised protozoa
from an inner pocket and stood thoughtfully regarding them. "Are they
as mad as the professor thought? What if they are? Discoveries aren't
made by 'safety first.' I'm going to do that experiment the minute
Crane gets his twenty million tube built and going." He rang for the
housekeeper.
"Will you make it part of your work," he requested the capable woman
who responded, "to see that Bertha is well taken care of? It may be
weeks until I have any use for her, but in the meantime I want her to
hatch all the eggs she lays."
The housekeeper put a broad hand over her mouth and turned aside. When
she recovered her composure, she ventured a practical suggestion.
"You might get Bertha a husband, if you want her eggs to hatch."
"Of course," the doctor agreed hastily. "Will you see to it?"
When she had retired out of earshot, Brown called up Crane.
"Hullo, Crane? Could you sleep? No more could I. How is your skin
this morning?"
"Practically better. I can't understand--"
"Neither can I, yet. But I'm getting warm. Have a look at the last
page of this morning's _Sun_. There's an interesting article on fish.
By the way, when you take a bath hereafter, sterilize the water as well
as you can before letting it down the drain. Better get a liberal
supply of cyanide of mercury and put about a tumblerful into the tub
when you are through."
"What for?"
"General precaution. That amount won't do any harm by the time it
reaches the sea, and it may prevent a world of mischief before it gets
there."
"Am I dangerously infected?"
"Probably not, in any mundane way. That's what makes you so
interesting. Going to start work on your new tube this morning?"
"Yes, as soon as I have broken the news to Kent that he must spend
about ten thousand dollars putting the transformers right again.
Friend Bork did a rare job as his parting shot. I was just going down
to the laboratory when you called up. By the way, never tell a soul
about last night. I'm beginning to believe it never happened."
"I'm not advertising. If anything happens, let me know."
On reaching Kent's outer office, Crane was greeted with ominous
formality by the secretary.
"Will you take a seat, Doctor Crane," she said, "until Mr. Kent is
ready to see you? He was about to send for you."
"Who's dead now?" Crane inquired flippantly.
The secretary ignored Crane's levity and merely stated that the
director was "in conference" with the trustees.
"I guess I'm fired," Crane remarked to the ceiling. "If so, will you
please tell Mr. Kent that I resigned last night?"
As the secretary deigned no reply, Crane moodily sat down and lost
himself in brooding. The spectacular damage to the transformers, he
guessed, was the inspiration of Kent's untimely session with the
trustees. They would naturally blame him for having left the door
unlocked. Well, he could not prove that he hadn't. Let them do what
they liked; he didn't give a damn. In spite of his assumed
indifference Crane realized that a dishonorable discharge from the
Foundation would cut pretty deeply into his self-respect. Moreover,
now that he was about to be fired--as he imagined--he suddenly
conceived a warm affection for the Foundation and for every member of
its staff, except of course Kent. A resonant voice asking for an
appointment with the director caused him to look up.
The secretary was staring in fascination at the dark, intelligent face
of the man addressing her, unable, apparently, to follow his question.
Like the librarian she was wondering where she had seen this striking
young man before, although she was In her early twenties with no love
affairs In her past.
"Will you please make an appointment for me with the director?" that
elusively musical voice repeated.
"As soon as Mr. Kent is free," she murmured, "I know he will be
delighted to see you, Mr.--"
"De Soto."
"Will you wait here? Mr. Kent is in conference."
"Must I wait? I should prefer to see him at once, as I have a full day
ahead."
"I'll see," she volunteered. Then it occurred to her that she did not
know the young man's mission.
"Mr. Kent will ask me your business." She all but apologized for the
indelicacy.
De Soto unfolded a morning extra and indicated the joyous headline:
"ERICKSON FOUNDATION DESTROYED." Of course the laboratory was not
destroyed; the giant transformers only were disabled. To have stated
so in cold print would have killed the story. On this occasion neither
the director nor the trustees were reluctant to confide their
misfortune to the press. The janitor early discovered the open door; a
short investigation by members of the staff, summoned from the
workshops, disclosed the extent of the damage. Too obviously it was
the work of an enemy from the inside. Kent, at the moment of De Soto's
appearance, was endeavoring to convince the trustees that Crane was
guilty.
"He practically told me to go to hell," he vociferated. "And he said
he cared nothing for what he called his 'silly job.'"
"Why not ask your secretary to call him, Mr. Kent, and ask him whether
he did it?"
Kent was game. He pressed a button. The buzzer called just as De Soto
unfolded the extra for the secretary's gaze.
"I have called about the damage to the transformers," he explained.
"Please tell Mr. Kent that."
"I will," she promised, and hastened to answer the buzzer.
All the time that De Soto stood parleying with the secretary, Crane
studied him minutely. By one of those common but unaccountable quirks
of human nature that often mystify us, he took an immediate and violent
dislike to the swarthy young man with the peculiar voice.
When De Soto asserted that he had called about the damage to the
transformers, Crane's curiosity naturally was aroused to the point of
acute physical discomfort. Left alone for a few minutes with the young
man, Crane decided to break the ice.
"You are an electrician?" he demanded of De Soto's back.
De Soto wheeled about sharply and found himself looking up at a rather
grim, square-jawed face on which more than a hint of hostility showed.
Before he knew what he was doing, De Soto found himself rocking in
uncontrollable laughter.
"If you'll tell me what's funny, I'll laugh too. Go on; don't mind me."
De Soto gulped and subsided--outwardly.
"I was laughing at you taking me for an electrician," he explained
glibly. "In a way I am, although radiations of the shortest
wavelengths--ultra violet, X-rays, gamma rays, and so on, clear into
the region of the hardest cosmic rays--are my specialties. You see, I
have graduated from electrical engineering. That is what you thought I
was interested in, from my remark to the secretary about the
transformers. That's merely to help me into a job here."
"You say you have worked in the cosmic rays, and even beyond?" Crane
demanded suspiciously, scenting a quack in this plausible young man.
"I don't seem to recall the name of De Soto in that field. Where did
you do your work, if I may ask?"
De Soto submitted to the unwarranted cross-examination with a good
grace.
"In Buenos Aires."
"At the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires?" Crane suggested
skeptically. He knew perfectly well that the national university of
the Argentine offered no work in the field De Soto claimed as his own.
De Soto, however, whether from accident or design, side-stepped the
rather obvious trap. Unknown to himself, he was lying, and lying quite
ably. The hastily imagined fiction of his birth in Buenos Aires, which
he had invented but a few short hours previously, was already a fixed
part of the life he had "always" known.
"No," he replied. "I did all my studying privately."
"Self taught?" Crane suggested the same bantering tone he might have
used to Bork. De Soto ignored the hidden slur.
"Why not? What are books for?"
"So you have never worked in a laboratory?"
For a moment De Soto was at a loss. He had carried out electrical
experiments. But where? Somehow the sure feeling of familiarity with
electrical apparatus, of which he felt confident, did not date with the
rest of his self-acquired education. Doubtless his inability to
connect the two was but another trifling instance of the amnesia from
which he seemed to suffer, Trusting that he was telling the truth, he
gave what appeared to him at the moment as the only reasonable answer.
"I had a small laboratory of my own."
Crane received this in silence. Further cross-examination was
postponed by the return of the secretary. She had been urging De
Soto's priority over Crane's in the matter of an interview with Kent
and the trustees.
"Mr. Kent will see you now," she announced, to De Soto.
Followed by the suspicious eyes of Crane, De Soto disappeared into the
inner sanctum. Crane favored the secretary with a sour look and
resumed his chair. Whether they fired him or not, he was not going to
leave until he learned De Soto's object.
Once in the director's sanctum, De Soto found himself the mark for
seven pairs of questioning eyes. Kent rose from his seat at the end of
the long table, his hand extended in formal welcome, while the six
trustees turned in their chairs to get a better look at the newcomer.
"You are from the press, Mr. De Soto?" Kent inquired.
"No," De Soto laughed. "I came about this." He tapped the article
about the damaged transformers. "The papers say there is a hundred
thousand dollars worth of mischief done."
"Exaggerated," one of the trustees interrupted. "Ten thousand will
cover it."
"What I propose is this," De Soto continued, acknowledging the
trustee's remark with a slight nod. "For not more than a total outlay
of five thousand dollars you can duplicate your whole battery of
transformers. Now, this is what I suggest. Spend five thousand
dollars, and I will show you how to do everything your high tension
laboratory ever did, or ever could do--provided you were to repair the
damage. Moreover, the entire apparatus will not exceed a cubic yard in
bulk."
Kent glanced at the trustees with a wan smile. His irreproachable
secretary, departing from her habitual caution, had admitted an
impossible crank to disrupt a most important conference. The quality
of Kent's smile slowly changed. It became puzzled. Why, precisely,
had he and the trustees listened so attentively to this swarthy young
man's preposterous claims? A trustee cut the knot.
"Can you make good on what you propose?" In spite of his shrewd
business sense he was strongly attracted by this magnetic young
fellow's personality and the strangely luminous, rational glow of his
eyes. "If you are not talking nonsense, you should be able to convince
experts. Want the chance?"
"Experts such as you have," De Soto replied truthfully but with
unintentional rudeness, "probably wouldn't understand my plans.
However, if you wish, I will try to explain."
"Ring for Dr. Crane," the trustee snapped. "I believe Mr. De Soto
knows what he is talking about."
At the mention of Crane's name, De Soto controlled a strong impulse to
laugh. When Crane entered, glum as a naughty boy expecting a
reprimand, De Soto turned his back on him. All through the ensuing
discussion the man who had been Bork never once looked his former chief
in the face.
The lively talk began with a trustee's suspicious questioning of De
Soto regarding the young man's scientific training. De Soto repeated
smoothly what he had already palmed off on Crane, adding several
circumstantial details. The story, strange as it seemed, hung
together. The trustee, unconvinced, let it pass at its face value.
After all, what did it matter who or what the man was, provided he
concealed an inexhaustible mine of diamonds under his thick black hair?
If he could do what he claimed in the matter of transformers, this
attractive young man must be an inventive genius of the very first
rank. At the rate of one dollar apiece for all patents taken out while
a member of the staff, De Soto might well be worth several hundred
million dollars to the Erickson Foundation before his contract expired.
The worldly wise trustee was already rehearsing the terms of the
ten-year contract which would sew up De Soto tighter than any dead
sailor about to be slipped overboard ever was.
From personalities the discussion soon launched into a bewildering
debate of technicalities between De Soto and Crane on the design of
high tension apparatus, the construction of more efficient insulators,
thinner than the thinnest tissue paper and, most important of all, an
entirely novel process for attaining a perfect vacuum. Even to the
untechnical trustees and the unscientific director it was evident that
the best of the argument was De Soto's from start to finish. As Crane
interposed one objection after another, only to have each demolished in
turn by a short sentence backed up by a shorter mental calculation, De
Soto began to lose patience with the slowness of the expert mind.
Finally, turning to the director in exasperation, he asked whether
there was one--only one--competent physicist in the Foundation. Kent
silently pressed a button. To the worshipping secretary he explained
that Mr. De Soto wished to confer with Doctors So-and-So, naming the
cream of the specialists enslaved to the Foundation.
They dribbled in by twos and threes, until a full dozen found
themselves involved in the most terrific battle of their distinguished
scientific careers. By one and twos they were eliminated temporarily
by hard facts or harder formulas hurled at their heads, only to rally
for the next attack and be again knocked flat. Whether De Soto was
right on his new theories, or on his novel project as a whole, was
beyond their powers to decide. There was no doubt, however, that he
had all the classical theories and current experiments--old stuff, in
his contemptuous phrase--at his finger tips. Lunch time had passed
long since; the dinner hour came and went unnoticed, and still the
battle raged. At last, shortly before midnight, De Soto had sunk his
last opponent. On many of the details of his project they were still
unconvinced, but they had shot their last round.
The signing of the contract followed as a matter of course. Departing
from their invariable custom, the trustees guaranteed to De Soto
royalties of one per cent on all inventions patented by him while a
member of the staff, in addition to the usual legal dollar.
While De Soto was affixing his signature--Miguel De Soto--to the
contract, Kent buttonholed the President of the Board, and poisoned
that potentate's mind against the defenseless Crane. All of Crane's
flippancy in the face of duty, his flagrant disrespect for decent
authority, and finally his heinous offense in leaving the door of the
high voltage laboratory open, and so causing thousands of dollars worth
of damage, were poured into the President's exhausted ear.
"You want me to ask for his resignation?" the President suggested. "Is
that what you're driving at? Give the word, and I'll do it. We have
just taken on Mr. De Soto at ten thousand a year _plus_ those robbing
royalties. Why not save Crane's salary? He's of no further use to us
that I can see. Mr. De Soto's field includes Crane's, I gather?" Kent
nodded. "Then say the word, and I'll give Doctor Crane his walking
papers."
"It might cause criticism if it got out," the cautious Kent demurred.
He saw his chance of sticking his longest knife into Crane, and he
determined to seize it. In fact, he had worked on the President with
just this purpose in view. "Why not cause him to resign voluntarily?"
The President all but grinned. "How?"
"Tell him henceforth he is to act as Mr. De Soto's assistant. Say that
we all know how proud he will be to work for so great a scientist as
this extraordinary young man has proved himself to be. Don't mention a
word about salary. Put it on the purely scientific plane of service."
"Leave it to me."
De Soto stood talking to three of the trustees as the President
descended upon Crane. Speaking in a loud voice so that none of the
technical staff present should miss the obvious moral, the President
delivered his honeyed ultimatum. The faces of the twelve men of the
staff went blank; those of the trustees beamed. Here was Crane's
chance to show his mettle. The technical experts prepared to offer
their own resignations the instant Crane refused the insulting offer;
the trustees wondered whose fertile mind had conceived this neat method
of firing a faithful employee whose services were no longer as
profitable as they had been. Crane's immediate response took all
parties completely aback.
"Thank you, Mr. President," he replied gravely. "I shall be honored to
serve as Mr. De Soto's technical assistant. And I shall never forget
your generosity in giving me this opportunity of showing my loyalty to
the Foundation and to Science."
Kent's jaw dropped. Crane's rounded speech of acceptance was a first
class imitation of what his own might have been under similar
circumstances. What did that long, lean devil of a Texan mean by it?
Was he forcing them to fire him outright, like men? Well, they weren't
such fools. They would put no shovel in his hand to fling mud at the
Foundation. So much for Kent. The President shot him a spiteful
glance as if to say, "You've made a fool of me. Two can play that
trick, as you will find out before long." The members of the staff
looked anywhere but at Crane. They would have backed him up to a man.
Who would have suspected him of having a yellow streak?
What of Crane? He meant every word he said. That he had phrased his
acceptance in fatter rhetoric than he usually fancied was merely the
luxury he allowed himself of insulting Kent before the trustees. Crane
knew exactly what Kent was trying to do, and he dared his petty tyrant
to do it like a man. As for the coldness of his scientific friends, he
felt that he could endure it as long as they. It was of no great
moment. The one thing that sustained him was his instinct that De Soto
was evil to the core, with a black, new evil, venomous beyond human
experience.
On passing into the outer office, they found Alice waiting to drive her
poor, tired father home. Kent seized the opportunity of further
humiliating Crane by presenting De Soto to his daughter with a great
show of arch-fatherly effusiveness. Crane observed the comedy, nodded
curtly to Alice, and strode out of the building. To overtake his
departing enemy with a last barbed dart, Kent raised his voice and
insisted that De Soto be his guest for a few days, until he found
comfortable quarters Bear the Foundation.
Two minutes later Kent's car overtook Crane. Alice was driving; Kent
was spread out on the back seat. De Soto, sitting up in front by
Alice, seemed to be progressing rapidly with the director's daughter.
"That fool!" Crane muttered. "Can't he see what De Soto is? I don't
mind being snubbed. But it is a bit thick when he uses Alice to do his
dirty work. Well, if she is that kind, I'm not a sentimental sap. She
can go to--"
Chapter Six--_DISCHARGED_
Six months after he began work at the Foundation, De Soto found himself
world-famous. Although he never read a newspaper, he could scarcely
avoid seeing his name at least once a week in the headlines as he
passed the newsstands. He had out-edisoned Edison and out-invented all
the electrical inventors of the past seventy-five years--according to
the press. Remembering that the papers made a hundred thousand dollars
worth of damage out of a paltry ten thousand in the matter of the
transformers, we may safely discount these early reports to about ten
per cent of their face value. When, some months later De Soto began
doing things of greater significance for humanity--things that could
not be evaluated in terms of dollars and cents--the press was dumb, and
for a sufficient reason. As long as the new so-called luxuries and
conveniences of living which De Soto created, seemingly in his sleep,
inspired the journalistic tongue, reporters and editors were on
familiar ground. But when De Soto, tired of playing Aladdin's lamp to
millions who rubbed him the wrong way, turned to the higher and more
difficult parts of invention, the world simply did not realize what was
happening to it.
De Soto's masterpiece was new in human history. To find its peer we
should probably have to go back at least as far as the beginning of
geologic time. The human race, in De Soto's vaster enterprises, was
merely a rather minor indiscretion on the part of mother nature. But
for the first six months of his dazzling career as the king of
inventors, Miguel De Soto lived up as best he could to what, he sensed,
a somewhat pampered world expects from its geniuses. They asked him
for bread and he gave them cake. The necessary physic after such a
debauch of sweet stuff was to come later, when they were surfeited.
In extenuation of his subsequent career, it should be remembered that
De Soto suffered from a blind spot in his mental vision. Like many men
of great talents he at first had mistakenly believed that the world
sincerely wished to better itself. If so, why shouldn't it be eager to
reach the best possible state in one quick stride, instead of
blundering this way and that like a drunken imbecile, and getting
nowhere in a thousand years? De Soto here made the usual mistake of
the super-intelligent in thinking that his own clear vision would
satisfy the blind.
The first six months at the Foundation passed like a Persian dream
before the half closed eyes of the purring trustees. Without the least
suspicion that their brilliant young employee was feeding them all this
unnecessary wealth for purposes of his own, they squatted like drowsy
bullfrogs on a warm summer day in their golden swamp, expanding their
already enormous business and swelling to the bursting point with
financial pride.
One example of De Soto's methods will suffice. It is already a classic
the world over, but its retelling here may throw some light on his
general campaign, which even now is not well understood outside of a
very narrow circle. His first great financial triumph was a mere
byproduct of his toy transformer and storage battery--the project which
got him his appointment to the staff of the Foundation. He had
undertaken to emprison twenty million volts in a small box, and to
control his trapped devil in any way the trustees desired. In short,
he promised to put the elaborate twenty million-volt laboratory, and
all of its rivals, completely out of business, and to do it for an
expenditure not exceeding five thousand dollars. When the trustees
remembered that their high tension laboratory had cost close on three
million dollars, they saw the most obvious commercial possibilities in
a flash. Although there was as yet no practical use for such a devil
box as De Soto promised to deliver--unless the military and naval
authorities might be tempted to flirt with it--the trustees had faith
enough in pure science to believe that somehow, some day, the dollars
would gush out of that evil box. Some young man as brilliant in a
practical way as De Soto seemed to be scientifically would come along
like Moses with the right kind of stick in his hand. Then, with one
resounding smack, he would smite the useless black box, crack it wide
open, and let the golden deluge drown the trustees in dividends.
De Soto did not wait for a greater than he to enrich the Foundation
beyond its thirstiest dreams. He did it himself, almost in his sleep.
One detail must be settled before the box itself could be constructed.
This was a revision of the whole theory and practice of insulation.
The huge strings of earthenware mushrooms that made the long distance
transmission of high voltage possible obviously would not do. The high
tension lines from the mountains to the cities carried but a paltry two
or three hundred thousand volts; De Soto must handle twenty million.
To insulate against such a pressure with glazed earthenware, or with
any of the known substances would require a mass of dead material
equivalent to several hundred times the small box into which De Soto
planned to compress his entire apparatus, insulation, transformers and
all.
Following a hint he had absorbed in his exhaustive reading, he saw that
the true way out of the difficulty was not the building of more and
more massive resistances of earthenware and the rest, but the practical
construction of material films thinner than the most tenuous soap
bubbles. These must be manufactured cheaply and deposited directly on
the wire carrying the high current as an invisible sheath not over a
few atoms in thickness--the thinner the better. With Crane's help, De
Soto had perfected the working drawings and specifications of the
process three days after he joined the Foundation. The plans were
turned over to the technical staff for practical development, and in
two weeks the Foundation had staked out its first El Dorado.
To their surprise, the trustees discovered that De Soto was an adept in
the finesse of service as understood by them. It was his campaign that
they launched against their innocent competitors. The Klickitat Lake
Municipal Power Company, having just completed its giant power plants
in the Cascades, was calling for bids on the insulation of its three
hundred thousand-volt trunk line. De Soto saw the Foundation's great
opportunity and, incidentally, his own. The Power Company belonged to
the people of Seattle. It was a public enterprise, supported entirely
by taxes. By eliminating dividends to stockholders, the public hoped
to obtain its power and light at a cost much below the current rates.
Why not, De Soto suggested to the trustees, donate the required
insulation to the public? The trustees saw the light and smothered
their indecorous grins. By presenting the public with a few thousand
dollars worth of the new insulated wire, and saving the oppressed
taxpayers several hundred thousand, the Foundation would net an
incalculable amount of free advertising.
The engineers of the Municipal Power Company came, saw a four days'
demonstration, and were conquered. High steel towers, tons of
insulation, and expensive copper cables were all replaceable by a thin
wire sheathed in the new film and suspended from trees, telephone poles
or broomsticks as convenient. In the words of their chief, it was a
knock-out. It was. In five weeks the Erickson Foundation had a
monopoly on insulation the world over.
This was but the beginning. De Soto, with Mephistophelean ingenuity,
talked the not ungenerous trustees into trebling the price of the new,
simple insulation the moment their strongest competitor collapsed.
Having created a new necessity of modern life, the Foundation had the
electrical industry at its mercy. To their credit it should be
recorded that the trustees did not yield without a short struggle to De
Soto's cynical importunities. Their profits already were outrageous;
why make them sheerly indecent? De Soto could have enlightened them in
one sentence, had he felt inclined. But the time for the dazzling
revelations of the surpassing splendor which was to burst upon the
trustees was not yet ripe; first they must be educated. They could not
withstand this frank young man's magnetic charm. One and all they
agreed that he was irresistible. He was.
All that De Soto asked in addition to his modest salary and rapidly
mounting royalties was the time occasionally to undertake a piece of
pure, unpractical research. As these short excursions into science for
its own sake always resulted in some radical improvement of existing
luxuries that sent whole businesses to the wall, the trustees humored
him. There was the little matter of high vacua, for example. De Soto
begged for a ten days' holiday in which he began his explorations of
the hardest cosmic rays. First he must obtain a practically perfect
vacuum. The so-called vacua of hard X-ray technique, where billions of
molecules of gas remain in each cubic inch after the diffusion pump has
done its utmost, were of no use in his project. He needed a tube from
which all but a hundred or two of the ultimate particles of matter have
been withdrawn. Again Crane and other members of the staff helped him
with the mechanical details, and again he triumphed completely.
As a byproduct he revolutionized the industry of making electric light
globes and radio tubes, cutting down the cost of exhausting these to a
fraction of a per cent of what it had been. The trustees beamed on
him, and told him to take a year's vacation if he wished. With a
subtle smile, which they failed to interpret correctly, he refused.
Later, he said, he would take a real holiday. They thought he was
merely modest in a decent, humble way, like all good scientists--of
their rather uninstructed imaginations.
In addition to the commercial byproducts of his earlier genius,
another, of a purely social character, was to have far-reaching
consequences for himself. Partly to spite Crane, and partly because he
had no insight into the more morbid aspect! of human character, Kent
insisted that De Soto occupy the guest suite in his house indefinitely.
De Soto consented, chiefly because he disliked the bother of hunting up
suitable quarters for himself. He breakfasted with Kent and Alice, but
took his other meals out, except for an occasional festive dinner in
honor of some new triumph of his commercialized genius.
The inevitable happened. Alice fell hopelessly, degradingly in love
with him. Before the irresistible charm of his resonant voice, his
perpetual high spirits--they seemed high to her--and his vibrant
vitality, she abased herself utterly. His careless words of greeting
became her treasured pearls of seraphic wisdom and celestial love. She
is not to be unduly censured for her blindness; De Soto might have had
any girl he fancied for the trouble of asking. But he never bothered
to ask.
The President of the Board of Trustees was blessed with a long and
accurate memory. His spite against Crane evaporated and condensed on
the hapless director. Kent, he remembered, had proposed the plan for
forcing Crane to resign. It had resulted in making the President feel
foolish--a disagreeable sensation to any self-respecting man.
Accordingly, when De Soto began conquering the electrical industry, the
President decided that Kent was no longer necessary to the prosperity
of the Erickson Foundation.
"How would you like to be director?" he jovially inquired of De Soto on
the morning of exactly the hundred and eightieth day of De Soto's
contract.
"How about Mr. Kent? What will he do?"
"Go fishing," the President hazarded with a slow smile of doubtful
sincerity. "You see eye to eye with me in this matter," he continued,
and De Soto did not deny the allegation. "Mr. Kent is no longer
necessary to us. What do the trumpery eight or ten millions a year
that he begs from old paupers amount to, anyway? The royalties from
your new oil switch alone--the cheapest thing you've done--make all
that Kent brings in look like a Mexican dollar. You take hold of
things and show the world what a real, up-to-date business
administration is."
De Soto lazily stretched his arms and yawned.
"All right. I'll quadruple your profits in a week."
The President was about to shake the new director warmly by the hand
when the latter, for no apparent reason, doubled up in an
uncontrollable spasm of laughter.
"This is rich," he gasped. "You will tell him of course?"
The President nodded, and De Soto went soberly to the workshops to
supervise the construction of the last unit of his cosmic ray
generator. That afternoon Kent broke the news to Alice.
"I have saved practically nothing," he confessed bitterly. "Well, I
can peddle life insurance till some place offers me a position. We
shall have to vacate this residence within a month. It will be De
Soto's now. He's director; I'm down and out."
"Perhaps he will ask us to stay here until we get settled," Alice
suggested, a sinking at her heart.
"Impossible! To accept hospitality from a man who has stabbed me in
the back? Never!"
But he did, that very evening, when De Soto, in response to a humble
hint from Alice, indifferently invited Kent and his daughter to stay as
long as they liked. They were to manage the house; he would pay the
expenses.
The morning after the disaster, Alice rose much earlier than usual and
waylaid the generous protector of the poor before he entered the
breakfast room. The utter self-abasement of her thanks seemed to rouse
De Soto's smouldering contempt.
"Are you a human being?" he demanded roughly.
"Of course," she laughed.
"Well, then--" he began and stopped abruptly. A brilliant idea for an
experiment had just flashed into his mind. His harsh tone softened,
and he laughed in the mellow way that he knew was music to the deluded
girl's soul.
"What I was going to remark," he continued, "was simply this. You are
human; so am I. All that I have done for you is nothing. Nothing!" he
repeated with furious emphasis. "If human beings can't do so little as
nothing for one another, and not have to be thanked for it, they are no
better than hogs. Or," he added after a reflective pause, "than a
certain cook and waiter I saw about six months ago. So please never
refer to this matter again. Stay here as long as you and your father
wish and let things go on exactly as they did before. I'm comfortable;
why shouldn't you be?"
His generous words, whose acid sting she missed completely, turned her
blind love to dumb adoration. She was his whenever he wanted her. But
he did not want her--yet. First he must perfect his generator.
All through the spectacular months of De Soto's rocket rise to world
fame, Crane served his superior as faithfully as he could in the tasks
that fell his way. Without the slightest twinge of jealousy,
professional or personal, Crane admitted that De Soto's mind soared
above his own a universe away.
Crane's first impression of De Soto remained as vivid as ever.
Outwardly the two men were on the friendliest terms. What the young
king of all inventors thought of his technical assistant he kept to
himself; Crane's opinion of his chief was too dangerous to be shared
with the rest of the staff. Brown was his one confidant. Their common
nightmare with the black widows in the laboratory had established a
bond between the two that nothing could break.
On the evening of Kent's dismissal, the doctor dropped in to spend an
hour or two with Crane.
"Wilkes called me up this afternoon," he began.
"Wilkes? Oh, yes, I remember. He's in biology over at the university,
isn't he?"
"Up to his neck in it. I doubt if he's deeper in than that. Did I
ever tell you about my little spat with him six months ago?" Crane
shook his head, and the doctor freely confessed the humiliating episode
of the vanishing protozoa. "Wilkes thought I was crazy drunk that
morning. He told me this afternoon that he poured that priceless
bottle of your historic bathwater down the kitchen sink the moment I
was out of his house. He had promised me like a gentleman and a
scholar that he would get one of the chemists to analyze it. When I
asked for a report some ten days later, he assured me the chemist had
found nothing but pure water with the usual traces of organic matter
and minerals--lime, and such stuff--that are in all tapwater. Like a
fool I believed him. Now he's kicking himself for the scurvy trick he
played me."
"Why?" Crane demanded, scenting a clue at last to the incomprehensible
mystery of the black widows.
"It's a long story. I'll cut it short. You remember that poisoned
fish scare we had six months ago?"
"When the fish in the bay turned up all spotted, and you asked me to
sterilize my bathwater?"
"Yes. And you remember how it passed off in a day or two? The fish
seemed to recover completely, or else all the affected ones died.
Anyhow, no biologist in this part of the world had curiosity enough to
ask the Health Department for one of the spotted fish to examine. I
don't blame them--I didn't think of it myself. Now here comes the
fortunate part. Some crooked inspector in the department, instead of
destroying the fish seized in the markets as required by law, sold the
lot to a Japanese cannery down the coast. Some of that canned fish
found its way to the table of Professor Hayashi, the expert in
parasitology at the Technical College in Tokyo. The discolorations on
the skin caught his eye at once. To cut a long story short, Hayashi's
microscopical examination of the diseased skin reveals myriads of
protozoa--the most rudimentary forms of animals--of species totally new
to science. Being a German-trained Japanese expert on parasites,
Hayashi went without food or sleep until he had prepared an exhaustive
series of microphotographs of these strange new beasts."
The doctor paused long enough in his story to extract half a dozen
beautiful photographs and the same number of his own hasty sketches,
made the night when he examined Crane's bathwater, from his pocketbook.
"Compare the photographs with the sketches. The photographs are
Hayashi's, the sketches mine. Professor Wilkes gave me those specimens
of Hayashi's work this afternoon. It seems that Hayashi picked on
Wilkes as being the likeliest man to recognize the protozoa if they
were known. The fish had been canned a few miles south of here,
according to the label on the can. Hence, Wilkes, being professor at
the university here, and presumably not dead, would know all about what
lay at his own back door. Unfortunately, Wilkes had poured the most
conclusive evidence, and my one chance to be famous with it, down the
kitchen sink. He called me up this afternoon to ask what is to be done
about it. I have several suggestions, but I'm not going to share them
with him. He's too fond of his kitchen. Well, what do you think of my
sketches? As true to life as the microphotographs, aren't they?"
"You copied Hayashi's?"
The doctor laughed. "No, I drew them from what I saw under the
microscope in that bathwater I got from you six months ago. It's a
great pity that you recovered as quickly as you did from that unique
itch."
"I may be able to oblige you again, in a day or two," Crane grinned.
"But go on. You were going to say something."
"Only this. I fell for the biggest fool on earth. By the margin of a
single stupid mistake, I have lost a new universe. If I had not gone
over to see old Wilkes that morning, I should have kept on believing in
my work. Now Hayashi will get whatever credit there may be in it.
This stuff is brand new, I tell you!" he exclaimed, warming to his
beloved protozoa. "These things could never have evolved from anything
we know. Structurally they are entirely different from any that have
ever been described. And to think that I saw them living and
multiplying under the lenses of my own microscope!"
The doctor lapsed into moody silence. "Well," he concluded, "it's too
late now. Still, Hayashi doesn't know the whole story. Until he or
someone else explains why those prolific little pests stopped
multiplying in the sea, we haven't even begun to explain them. I
should have expected every fish in the Pacific Ocean to be as gorgeous
as a rainbow two months after the infection started in our harbor. But
it stopped suddenly and absolutely in a day. Why?"
"Ask me another. I'm not good at riddles. Want to see some more
blood-red bathwater?"
"Where?" the doctor exclaimed, leaping to his feet.
"In the bathtub, of course."
"Lead me to it!"
"It isn't there yet. But, if De Soto and I have any luck tomorrow,
I'll brew you twenty gallons of the reddest water you ever saw. He and
I have about finished his first two million-volt X-ray tube. It's no
longer than my forearm. Built on entirely new principles. So, if my
exposure to the hard X-rays had anything to do with the infected state
of my skin, we should know it by tomorrow night. What do you think?"
Brown looked depressed. There were so many factors that his optimistic
friend had overlooked that the doctor dared not feel enthusiastic.
"You forget the time element," he said. "One exposure, even of thirty
hours, may not be sufficient by itself. Why did those fish suddenly
recover? No; there is something beyond hard X-rays at work in all
this. Your luck six months ago may have been only an accident due to a
concurrence of causes that won't happen together again in a million
years."
"Cheer up. We can only try, you know. This time tomorrow I may be
wishing I were dead."
"I hope so," the doctor replied absently, dreaming of his lost
universe. "In case an accident does happen, we must be prepared. You
say De Soto's tube is built on entirely new principles?"
"New from beginning to end, from anode to cathode--like everything else
he does. Lord! I wish I had one per cent of the brains that kid has."
"Then you might never duplicate that scarlet bath. It was the most
brilliant thing you ever did. The very blunders of your own
two-million-volt tube may have been responsible for what happened."
"Possibly," Crane admitted. "X-rays were discovered half by accident.
It begins to look as if my precious tube may have been in the same
class. Something that Bork and I did in spite of ourselves touched off
a real discovery--which we succeeded in smothering between us."
"And I, too," Brown sighed, "missed the essential thing. Well, we must
be prepared. Will you take half a dozen of Bertha's eggs with you to
the laboratory tomorrow? Don't let De Soto know about them. Keep them
wrapped up in the pockets of your working coat."
"Don't you think," Crane suggested, "it is about time for you to give
me a hint of your theory? I won't steal it."
"You'd be insane if you did. Even I haven't the nerve to talk it over
with a biologist. Very well, here goes--your itch, my protozoa, and
our black widows."
For an hour and a half the doctor defended the shrewd guesses and bold
theories which he had devised to account for the apparently unnatural
adventures in which he and Crane had participated. To Crane's frequent
interruptions that the physics of the explanation, at least, was too
wild for any sane man to listen to, the doctor retorted that only a
hopeless pair of lunatics could have witnessed what Crane and he saw
with their own eyes in the twenty-million-volt laboratory. Was that a
fact of experience, or was it not? Did they see black widows by the
hundred as huge as spider crabs, or didn't they? Well, then, the
doctor continued somewhat irrationally, if nature can upset her
so-called facts to suit herself, why can't she equally well break the
puerile laws which we imagine for her discomfort? Hadn't all of the
great generalizations of Nineteenth Century physics been scrapped or
changed out of all recognition in the first three decades of the
Twentieth?
Yes, Crane admitted, but why try to answer the old insanities with new
ones even more insane? To which Brown replied that when in a lunatic
asylum--meaning modern physics--do as the lunatics do; namely cut your
theories according to your facts.
It was a wild argument and a merry one. The climax was a roar of
laughter from both disputants simultaneously. For it occurred to them
that they were but slightly parodying the proceedings of two recent
world scientific congresses which they had attended--Crane in physics,
Brown in biology.
"That settles it," Crane gasped, wiping the tears from his yes. "I'll
take a crate of eggs to the laboratory tomorrow."
"Don't!" the doctor implored. "Half a dozen, no more. I don't want a
man as brainy as young De Soto is to suspect what I'm up to. The least
hint to a man of his intelligence, and I'm dished. He would clean it
up in a week."
"Perhaps he has already," Crane suggested quizzically. "By the way,
all our talk made me forget my real news. Kent's fired."
"What! When?"
"This morning. De Soto told me. The trustees, it seems, decided they
didn't need Kent any longer, now that De Soto is bringing in the money
by the trainload. So they kicked him out."
"The low hounds!"
"Oh, I don't know. Business is business. They made De Soto director."
"And he accepted?"
"Why not? They had no further use for Kent. Live and learn ethics,
doctor. All professions aren't like yours. I only wish they were.
Even De Soto seemed disgusted with humanity in general and with the
President in particular. It was the first time I have seen him show
any human feeling. He was quite glum all the afternoon till about six
o'clock, when we finally managed to put his new tube together. Then he
yawned--he's always yawning--and began laughing like the devil. I mean
it; he laughed exactly as a good fundamentalist thinks the devil laughs
when he sees some nice boy downing his first drink of whiskey. It made
my flesh creep. I don't like him."
"You still distrust him?"
"Yes, and I don't know why. Sometimes I have a feeling that he is
about five million years old."
"Absurd. You had better be going to bed. Don't forget to call for
those six eggs on your way to the laboratory tomorrow."
"I won't. How's Bertha, anyway?"
"Fine. She and Roderick have done nobly. My back garden is full of
broilers now, and I haven't the heart to eat one of them. The
housekeeper threatens to give notice unless I sell a dozen. She can go
if she likes. Well, I'm going. See you in the morning."
Crane duly called for the six new laid eggs the next morning and joined
De Soto at the laboratory at eight o'clock sharp. For once in his life
De Soto seemed to be laboring under the strain of repressed excitement.
"Put on these," he ordered, handing Crane a long shroud of crackly
transparent material, with overshoes, gloves and hood of the same. He
himself was already armored for their dangerous work. The crackly
stuff, not unlike the thinnest isinglass, was another by-product of De
Soto's incessant inventiveness.
The walls, floor, ceiling and window panes of De Soto's small private
laboratory were closely "papered" with this thin, transparent ray
insulation. It would not do to have stray radiations penetrating into
adjacent laboratories and deranging delicate electrical apparatus.
Crane waved the proffered garments aside.
"No, thanks. I've worked around rays as hard as these, and I'm still
kicking."
"Better not try it again," De Soto advised, with just the suspicion of
a threat in his voice. "Put them on."
"Sorry, but I must decline," Crane replied with a defiant grin, his
square jaw thrust slightly forward. "You see, I want to do a little
experimenting myself."
For three seconds that seemed to Crane to stretch to three eternities,
De Soto's blazing black eyes fixed upon his. "What is happening to
me?" Crane thought. "I feel as if my brain were being torn to pieces."
"What experiment are you going to do?" he heard De Soto's voice asking
in tones of deadly calm.
"Nothing much," Crane replied. He felt sane again. "I just wanted to
verify my guess that rays as hard as these cannot affect human cells."
"Human cells?" the deadly voice echoed, slightly emphasizing the first
word.
"Yes--the units from which our muscles, bones and nerves are built up.
You know what I mean."
"I know what human cells are," De Soto said slowly, with deliberate
ambiguity. His tone implied that he suspected Crane of an interest in
cells not human. "Put on these things, and let us get to work."
"I have told you I prefer not to."
"Don't make it my unpleasant duty to discharge you for insubordination
as my first action as director."
Crane hesitated. For a second he was tempted to defy the new director
and take his medicine. Then he remembered why he had swallowed his
pride in the first place when Kent tried to make him resign. He also
thought of Brown, and the disappointment of his friend should he fail
in the matter of the eggs. Without a word he shed his working coat and
hung it on a hook behind the door. De Soto followed him with his
burning eyes.
"Why did you take off your coat? This material weighs very little.
You won't be too warm with your coat on under this. I'm wearing mine."
"I'll feel freer without so many clothes," Crane replied.
"You have something in the pockets of your coat that you wish to be
exposed to the full effect of these rays. Take out whatever you have,
and destroy it. There's an oxy-acetylene torch by that bench."
Crane tried to bluff it out. Going to his coat, he extracted the half
dozen new laid eggs and casually exhibited them for De Soto's
inspection.
"My lunch," he explained.
Without replying, De Soto took one of the eggs and held It up to the
light.
"You eat them raw?"
"Are they raw?" Crane asked in well feigned astonishment. "That girl
at the lunch counter must have done it as a joke on me--or else she was
rushed and made a mistake."
For answer De Soto took the six eggs, one at a time and smashed them
against the wall behind Crane.
"I'll take you out to lunch," he laughed good-humoredly. Suddenly his
whole manner darkened. His eyes blazing, he shot an accusing question
at the pale face before him.
"Did you come back here last night after I left?"
"I don't get your drift."
"Do you know what kind of a tube this is?"
"A two-million-volt X-ray, if it's the one I've been helping you build."
"It is the same one. Could you make another like it?"
"How could I? You made the cathode and the anode yourself. I don't
know the first thing about their construction. And I have no idea what
that thing like a triple grid in the middle is for. All I know about
your tube is what you've told me. You said it was for hard X-rays.
It's all new to me."
"It might be a device of great commercial value?"
"For all I know it might."
"Go to the office and get your time. You are discharged."
Crane turned on his heel and walked out without a word.
Chapter Seven--_WARNED_
Crane did not bother about his pay check at once. It could be
collected later. For the moment a matter of greater importance
pressed. He sauntered into the small chemical laboratory where tests
of materials were carried out in connection with the electrical work.
Only one man, a technical assistant, was in the laboratory. Looking up
from his work he greeted Crane with a curt nod. Like the rest of the
staff he treated Crane coldly since the latter's degradation in rank.
"I'm coloring a meerschaum pipe," Crane volunteered. "Got any beeswax
or anything of that kind?"
"There's some in the drawer under the bench."
"Thanks." Crane helped himself to four cakes and walked out. On
reaching his own office, he locked the door, and proceeded to take
impressions of all his keys to the laboratories and workshops of the
Foundation. It would be a simple matter to have duplicates made.
"They may put me in jail before I finish," he grinned to himself.
"Anyhow, I'll give them a run for their money first."
In the business office Crane explained that he had come to collect his
pay.
"But it is only the fifteenth of the month, Doctor Crane," the clerk
objected. "Of course, if you want an advance, I daresay it can be
arranged. I'll have to ask the head bookkeeper."
"Don't bother. I'm fired."
"Fired? What for?"
"Being too smart for our new director. Make out the usual month's
bonus for discharge without notice."
"Sorry, but I can't. We don't give any bonus now."
"Since when?"
"Yesterday, before Mr. Kent was discharged. The trustees made the rule
before they elected Mr. De Soto."
"I see. They don't overlook anything, do they? Is the President of
the Board anywhere about?" The clerk nodded. "All right, call him
out, will you? It's the last favor I shall ever ask of anyone
connected with the Erickson. Here are my keys."
"But I can't do that. He's busy."
"Never mind. Tell him I'm here with an urgent message from Mr. De
Soto. Honest; I'm not fooling."
The clerk was fooled. Presently the high potentate himself hurried out
of his lair to receive the urgent message in person.
"Yes, Doctor Crane? You had better come into my office."
"Perhaps I had."
"Now, what is it?" the President demanded when the door was closed.
Crane, looked him squarely in the eyes.
"You can go to hell!" he said.
"I shall ask the Director to discharge you," the President roared when
he recovered his breath.
"Too late. He just did it. I meant that message from myself to you
personally. You're a pretty cheap sort of skate. Nevertheless, I'm
rather sorry for you and the rest of this firm of pawnbrokers. De Soto
is making you all multimillionaires in record time, isn't he? And he
loves you all better than if you were his brothers? Fine. Take it
from me, he hates every one of you worse than a rat hates rat-poison.
I know that young fellow; you don't. Look out that he doesn't leave
you flat. That's all."
The President's face went a pasty yellow. For the first time it dawned
on him that De Soto might have been laughing at him, not at the
unfortunate Kent, when the latter was so swiftly fired. That laugh, in
retrospect, had a peculiar quality. Swallowing what remained of his
pride, the President motioned to Crane to be seated.
"Of course, I should be very angry with you," he began jovially, "for
what you said when you first came in. However, boys will be boys, eh?
Now, don't get sore because you think you've lost your job. Perhaps
you haven't. How would you like to be my technical secretary? I get
hundreds of letters from all sorts of people that I can't answer
properly. You know how it is in my position. What about it? Fifty
per cent increase in salary, of course."
"I'm afraid it wouldn't do," Crane said. "The Foundation can't afford
to antagonize its new director."
The President regarded him thoughtfully before replying.
"You're loyal to us, aren't you?" he remarked with sincerity, as if the
discovery surprised him--as indeed it well might.
"I have some pride in my profession, if that is what you mean," Crane
admitted.
"Am I to infer that you think Mr. De Soto lacks professional pride?"
"De Soto is too brainy to take pride in anything. That's the trouble
with him."
"H'm. You think he may be playing a game of his own?" Crane nodded
slightly. "What sort of a game?"
"As De Soto has several thousand times the mind that I have, I can't
guess what his game is. It may all be my imagination."
The President paced the carpet in silence. Coming to a halt before
Crane, he went to the roots of his doubt.
"Why are you telling me all this? Can't you see that it may be to your
own disadvantage?"
"That's easy. Because I hate De Soto. I know," he continued with a
dry smile, "that men don't hate one another nowadays outside of the
movies. It simply isn't done--in the way that I hate De Soto. Still,
I do, and that is the plain fact."
"Why do you hate him?"
"How can I tell? It may be repressed professional jealousy, for all I
know. More probably it is based on fear--or cowardice, if you like to
put it so. I'm afraid of what he may do to me, and to the Foundation."
"What do you suspect?"
"Nothing definite. Everything about the man, except his scientific
ability, is vaguely rotten. My guess is that he is planning something
brand new to take us all by surprise. We probably shan't know what has
happened to us until it is all over."
"Would you care to act as my agent to keep an eye on things? No one
need know that you are connected with me or with the Foundation in any
way."
"I'm not a detective. Still, in case I get into trouble I may as well
tell you that I intend to keep an eye on Mr. De Soto on my own account."
The President touched a button. When the clerk appeared he requested
him make out a check to Doctor Crane for the amount of five years'
salary, "as a token of appreciation," he added for the clerk's
misinformation, "for his excellent services to the Foundation in the
past."
"Now, Doctor Crane, perhaps you can be more explicit. What do you
plan?"
"Just what I have told you. If I were rich," he added with a grin, "I
should go right back to the laboratory now and shoot De Soto. Then I'd
hire the best lawyer in the country to get me off. Your new Director
is more dangerous than any mad dog."
"In what way dangerous? You are making pretty serious charges, you
know."
"I can't tell you definitely, because I don't understand myself. But I
can convince you, or any other business man, that De Soto had better be
handled with care. The Erickson has sent quite a few businesses to the
wall recently, hasn't it? The whole industry of insulation as it was a
short time ago, for example. We all saw how it was done. Has it never
occurred to the trustees that the Erickson might go the same way?"
"But Mr. De Soto is under contract to us for ten years," the President
protested weakly.
"What of it? He won't have to break his contract to break you."
"He can't be so unscrupulous as you suggest. Who ever heard of a
scientist turning crook like that? All the men on this staff are as
honest as the day is long."
"Perhaps it is the other way about. De Soto may have been a crook
before he took up science. According to his story he comes from Buenos
Aires. I've pumped him. He never saw South America. As to contracts,
he has as little respect for them as he has for--I don't know what.
Why shouldn't he leave you in the lurch tomorrow, if he likes, and go
over to some of your competitors? Before the courts had settled the
row, you would be flat broke."
The President was now perspiring freely. If De Soto could lie about
his native country, why not about business matters? The possibilities
of a broken contract were too obvious and too awful to be contemplated
in silence.
"What would you do in our case--provided your suspicions are justified?"
"Sell out to my nearest competitors. Let them absorb the shock. It's
coming."
"We can't," the President almost groaned. "Business details--I needn't
bother you. But we can't." He tried to believe that Crane was merely
letting his imagination run wild, but he could not. Innumerable slight
inconsistencies of word and action on De Soto's part loomed up now with
sinister significance. For the first time the President suspected that
De Soto's perpetual good humor and high spirits were the rather cheap
disguise assumed by a man who had much to conceal. "I'm glad you have
warned us," he admitted unhappily. "If you learn anything you will let
us know? You won't find us ungrateful. Business is business, you
know," he concluded with a rueful attempt at jocularity.
"I know," Crane retorted grimly. "So does Kent. That's why I came to
tell you what I did first. I had no idea it would end this way.
Thanks for the check; I'll need it. And please remember that if I get
into hot water, it will pay the Foundation handsomely to fish me out.
We are working on the same job, but for different reasons. Good
morning, and thanks again."
They parted almost on good terms, but not quite. Crane still despised
the Foundation's business methods; the President resented Crane's
greater penetration in seeing a practical danger which he himself
should have noticed months ago.
The next, and last, person to be warned was Alice. She, presumably,
would still be living at the Director's residence; De Soto could not
have turned the Kents into the street already. Hailing a cab, Crane
directed the driver to take him to a locksmith's on the other side of
the city. In the dingy little shop he asked the dried-up old tinker to
duplicate the keys impressed in the wax, and to have them finished by
five o'clock. "A rush order," he explained. "My partner lost his
office keys, and I lent him mine." Crane then drove to the Director's
residence and asked for Mr. Kent. The man who answered replied that
Mr. Kent was out.
"Is Miss Kent at home?"
"I will inquire."
Before surrendering his card, Crane scribbled on it, "May I see you for
a few minutes? Important."
Although he had not seen Alice since the night when she passed him in
her car with the newly hired De Soto, he felt reasonably certain of her
state of mind.
Looking back on their friendship he admitted that he might have loved
her, if circumstances had permitted their bantering goodfellowship to
ripen, but that- he had not. Her sudden and complete discarding of his
friendship argued that she also had never cared seriously for him. If
her indifference had been a pose to quicken his love for her, she would
not have let it drag on indefinitely as she had. Her infatuation for
De Soto, like his for her-according to Kent's sly, optimistic hints
dropped to exasperate Crane--was genuine. Finally, Crane admitted to
himself, he was a bachelor by instinct, as he had told Bork that
afternoon in the high tension laboratory.
Alice entered, pale and distraught. He saw that she was still
beautiful. But she had aged ten years, and all her happy spontaneity
was gone. Worry over her father's plight, he speculated, could not
account for all of the sad change. And instantly his hatred against De
Soto doubled. He himself had never loved her, he now realized fully.
But she had been such a good fellow that he resented De Soto's malign
influence over her as fiercely as if she were his wife.
"It must be months since I've seen you, Doctor Crane," she said,
extending her hand.
"Several, Miss Kent," he replied, noticing the formality of her
address. Well, he could dance to any tune she called.
"You wished to see me about something?"
"Yes." He went to the point at once. "About Mr. De Soto."
"I must refuse to discuss Mr. De Soto with you," she interrupted
hastily, her cheeks flaming.
"I don't intend to discuss him. As one human being to another, I shall
tell you a fact that you should know. I do not apologize for what I
say. It is none of my business. That is true. And it violates every
decency of good society. What of it?"
"I won't listen!" she cried, putting her hands over her ears, and
starting for the door. "Please go."
In one stride he overtook her. Forcing her hands to her side, he
delivered his message.
"De Soto is rotten to the core. He is not fit for any decent human
being to associate with. If you marry him, you will kill yourself to
be rid of him. Use your eyes and your brains!"
He released her hands and she fled sobbing.
"Well, I've done it," he muttered. "It will make her watch him anyway.
But I'm too late. That fool Kent!"
From the Kent's home he hurried to call on Brown. The doctor was in
his office busy with a patient. At last the sufferer left, and Crane
was admitted.
"Hullo," Brown exclaimed, "Not working today? Don't say you're itching
again," he cried, hopefully.
"No such luck," Crane grinned. "But I'm hot enough. De Soto fired me
the first thing this morning."
In answer to the doctor's solicitous questions, Crane briefly told the
whole story, including his interviews with the President and Alice.
Brown was shocked. The thought that his half dozen eggs had brought
his friend to grief filled him with remorse and dismay.
"What will you do now?" he asked.
"Take things easy for a time. Till five o'clock this afternoon, to be
exact. I forgot to mention that I'm having duplicate keys made to all
the laboratories and workshops of the Erickson. They'll be done at
five."
"What? You don't mean to say you're going to burglarize the place?
That is what it would amount to, now that you are discharged. Better
not try anything so foolish."
"It may be foolish, but I'm set on it. And I'm going to make my first
attempt about one o'clock tomorrow morning--just when it's darkest. I
know when the watchman makes his rounds to the various buildings. He
and I will contrive not to meet. There's no danger worth mentioning.
If they catch me at it, I shall appeal to the President and ask him to
lie me out of the scrape. But I'm going to find out what De Soto is up
to, no matter what it costs. The sooner the better."
"I agree to the last," Brown seconded. "The way he smashed those eggs
when he found they were raw looks bad. I don't half like it. De Soto
knows something he shouldn't. We've got to learn what it is."
"We?" Crane echoed.
"Yes. You and I. Now, don't argue. But for me, you never would have
got into this mess. I'm going with you to stand guard and see that you
don't go to the penitentiary. Don't put too much faith in your friend
the President."
"I don't," Crane grinned. "If he saw a chance of making a dollar out
of it, he would double-cross himself. Well, I shan't mind if you do
come. You can slip away if anything unpleasant happens. Shall I call
for you about twelve tonight?"
"All right. It has just occurred to me that we shall have a glorious
chance to perform a crucial experiment if we can get hold of De Soto's
tube for a second or two. Can I bring Bertha? I'll drug her before we
start so she won't squawk."
"Bring her along. She can stand the risk, if we can."
De Soto's morning, after he had discharged Crane, passed pleasantly
enough. The lack of an assistant did not inconvenience him, as he was
essentially a lonely worker. In fact he had retained Crane more as a
blind to the trustees than as a help to himself. By acquiescing in
what seemed to be their desires with regard to Crane, he not only
proved himself a good cooperator, but also a decent fellow, whose work
need not be carried out in secret. Actually, he feared no ordinary
physicist.
When Crane walked out, De Soto's first act was to lock the door and
pull down all the window shades. He was now secure from uninvited
observation.
He was about to set his tube in operation when he paused thoughtfully,
as if in doubt. Going to the closet, where the suits of insulating
fabric hung, he selected a second shroud, pair of gloves, hood and
overshoes of the transparent material, and put on the whole outfit over
those he already wore. This double protection might be unnecessary; he
rather thought it was. But De Soto was a cautious worker, careful of
his perfectly tuned body, and he took no chances.
Ready at last for his test, he carefully connected his eighteen-inch
tube to the terminals of what Crane called the devil box--a black cubic
yard of insulated steel, apparently, capable of delivering a steady
current at anything from one volt pressure to twenty million. If
necessary, he could pass the full twenty million through his tube for a
week. Having made the requisite adjustments, he released the full
twenty million volts at one turn of a thumb screw.
There was no hissing crackle, no sudden splash of blinding light from
the tube, no fuss or fury of any sort whatever. For all that an
observer could have told, the tube was dead. Whatever was taking place
in it, if anything, was far beyond the spectrum of light. If waves
were being generated under the terrific impact of the electrons in the
tube, ripped from the cathode by the full bolt of twenty million volts,
those waves were so short that they affected no eye. Anyone except its
inventor might have casually picked up the tube with his bare hand.
De Soto seemed satisfied. He disconnected the tube and turned a small
screw on its side. Gradually, a thin pencil of black metal advanced
into the vacuum, directly into the path that the discharge from the
cathode must follow. The tube was again connected and the full current
turned on and quickly off. Again there was no flash or other obvious
indication that anything had happened. By a simple device it was
possible to remove the pencil of metal from the tube without admitting
a single atom of gas into the tube. Having removed the pencil, De Soto
walked to the farther end of the laboratory, adjusted the pencil
between the terminals of a huge storage battery, and turned on half the
current. The metal pencil glowed from dull red to scarlet, then to
pale blue, and finally to a dazzling white as the current passed
through it. De Soto reached for a pocket spectroscope and studied the
light emitted by the incandescent metal. Evidently the result so far
was satisfactory, for he smiled. Still keeping his eye on the
spectrum, he reached out with one hand and switched on the full
current. There was a flash, a sharp report, and darkness. He had seen
all that was necessary. The pattern of brilliantly colored lines
crossing the spectrum as the incandescent metal exploded to atoms told
its own story. The metal had been transmuted into a different element
from what it had been before the full discharge of the twenty million
volt tube struck it.
One after another De Soto inserted pencils of the metallic elements
into his tube, gave them the limit of what the devil box concealed,
extracted them, and subjected them to the simple, conclusive tests of
flash spectrum and spark spectrum. He was already bored; the outcome
was known in advance. These verifications of what he knew must take
place in his hardest of all rays were but the necessary tests to assure
himself that the construction of his tube was not faulty. As a mere
detail in his true project, he had accomplished, on a wholesale scale,
the transmutation of the elements--the dream of the alchemists and one
goal of modern technology. Others had knocked the electron shells off
the atoms of the elements, and still more ingenious experimenters had
even tampered with the all but inaccessible inner core, the nucleus.
By controlling the whole scale of radiation, from the longest radio
waves to the shortest cosmic rays, in one simple, comprehensive
generator, De Soto could pass up or down the whole series of chemical
elements at will, as an accomplished pianist strums over his octaves.
All this, however, was but the first step toward his goal. The hard,
invisible, new radiations released by the transmutation of one element
into another were the tools he required for his untried project.
For the moment he was lazily satisfied. After all, it was no great
feat. Had he not done it when he did, some routine worker in physics
must have succeeded within ten years. Literally scores were racing
against one another along parallel roads to the same end. Where he
surpassed what the natural development of physics would have suggested,
was in his absolute control of the mechanism of disintegration. No
sudden outgush of energy destroyed his apparatus in uncontrollable
fury. The perfection of his technique permitted him to stop instantly
any explosion of matter that might start; in fact an automatic
regulator of the simplest pattern--simple, that is, to anyone with the
eye for seeing nature as it is--held the incipient whirlwinds of
destruction in leash.
So far all was well. To proceed farther he needed new materials. No
rudimentary metal would serve his purpose. He must have highly complex
compounds of a score of elements, all delicately adjusted in perfect,
natural balance. The man-made products of the chemical laboratory were
too artificial. If one would question nature, he must use the living
things that are nature's most perfect mode of expression.
As he raised the blinds, he pondered his next step, and he smiled.
Nature, or chance, he thought, had been kind to him. It had given him
a perfect body and an unparalleled mind. What more could he wish? A
partner with whom to share these bounties of generous mother nature.
The thought of what he was about to do doubled him up in a spasm of
laughter.
"Millions and millions and millions like her," he gasped, "and they
don't know what is going to happen. All like her, every last one of
them. How long will it last? Another ten or twenty million years? Or
perhaps thirty million?" For a moment his mirth overpowered him. He
was helpless, till his bitter humor died of its own exhaustion.
"Thirty years," he said slowly, coldly, in answer to his own sardonic
question. "Eighty years from now every living thing will be happy.
This is the end we have striven for since the days when we lived with
beasts, and like beasts, in caves. Who will ever guess? Frogs and
guinea pigs, Alice and the millions like her, my own children, will
never know what I have done for them. What a joke!"
He removed his protecting hoods, shrouds, gloves and overshoes, and
strolled over to take a last look at his tube. An exclamation of
dismay burst from his lips. The crystal window of the tube glowed with
a faint green fluorescence. Leaping to the devil box, he searched
frantically for the faulty connection which permitted the current to
leak into the box. There was no means of "killing" the whole box; it
was automatic and self-contained. Until he found the leak there was
nothing to be done. Not succeeding in his first dozen frenzied trials
of the screw switches, he raced to clothe himself again in his
protective armor. Was he too late? The hardness of the rays emitted
along with that pale fluorescence was an unknown quantity until he
could determine the strength of the current leaking from the box. In
his confusion he had not thought of the obvious way of disconnecting
the tube from the box, but had assumed that some switch was not fully
open. Hence his first frantic attempts now rose to reproach him with
the stigma of stupidity.
"Am I like the rest?" he gasped, hurrying back to the box. "A
blundering fool after all?"
This time he found the trouble at once. The one screw switch that he
could have sworn he opened was still just barely closed. For anyone
working around such deadly apparatus, this trivial oversight was a
blunder of the first magnitude. Approximately two million volts were
still streaming into the tube.
"I should have tested that switch first," he muttered. "Am I a common
fool? Well, this is a warning to do everything in the stupid, routine
way these cattle use about this stable."
Once more he removed his protective garments. This time he found
everything 'dead,' as it should have been. For a moment he felt old
and tired. Before he realized that he was speaking, his lips had
propounded a strange question.
"Who am I?" The voice seemed to speak from a forgotten world. "And
what am I doing here?" Again the words seemed uneasily familiar.
"Didn't I make a mistake like that before?" he continued in his normal
voice. "Where was it, and when? Strange that I can't remember. Yet I
could swear that I once saw a green light like that, only more intense.
It brightened, and grew white. Then a black piston destroyed it in
total darkness. How could that be? Only the complete destruction of
radiation could give such an effect, I never did this before. What is
the matter with me?"
Unable to answer, he left the laboratory, carefully locking the door
behind him. Once outside in the brilliant sunshine he recovered
rapidly. The cloudiness of his mind quickly cleared, and he began
visualizing his immediate purpose. It was a few minutes past twelve.
He stepped into the business office and used the telephone.
"Is Miss Kent speaking?" he asked when he got his number. "This is Mr.
De Soto. I've been working hard all the morning, and don't fancy going
to a restaurant for lunch. Can you give me something if I come out to
the house? Anything will do."
The happy girl's reply was scarcely coherent. Yet De Soto understood
the sense behind the nonsense of her words.
"Thank you, Alice. I shall be right out."
As he got into a taxi the queer sensation again overcame him. "Am I
going soft? Bah! All I need is food and exercise."
To Alice the luncheon was nectar and ambrosia; to De Soto it tasted
like lobster and icewater, which is partly what it was. The food,
however, was not his chief concern. As they passed into the
conservatory, he came to the point.
"Alice," he began in his resonant voice, "what happened yesterday has
made me think a great deal about your future and your father's. Who
would take care of you if I were to go away? No; please don't
interrupt. You do need looking after, and so do I. Why can't we
compromise? I have loved you since the first night I saw you. Will
you marry me--now, this afternoon?"
Her answer was a foregone conclusion, and De Soto knew it, Feeling her
warm young body in his arms he almost got a thrill.
They were married at three o'clock by a justice of the peace. Kent was
not present, as he had disappeared into the bowels of the city in
search of a job and could not be reached.
It cannot truthfully be said that love transformed Miguel De Soto,
however devoutly such a consummation was to be desired. His marriage
was for a definite purpose. If, toward the end, he got more than he
bargained for in the way of love, it was by accident and not design.
To prepare for what he hoped to do, he took Alice on a shopping
expedition as soon as they were married. She ordered whatever took her
fancy in the way of personal adornment, while De Soto admitting a
weakness which she had never suspected, won her bridal love completely
by his own purchases. They were made in queer quarters of the city,
near the market places, where live stock is offered for sale. Small
animals, he declared, had been his boyhood friends, and now that he was
a sedate married man he could afford to gratify the thwarted longings
of years to possess a select menagerie of his own. Guinea pigs, white
rats and robust frogs were his special pets, although he also betrayed
a weakness for the common chicken. All this squeaking, croaking,
crowing and cackling family was ordered to be delivered at once to the
Foundation residence--Kent's former home--and to be installed in the
appropriate pens, coops, runways, ponds and cages by nightfall. It was
a collection that would have made a geneticist's mouth water. Alice
almost cried, so happy was she at the unsuspected tenderness of her
husband and lover.
At six o'clock Kent returned, footsore, heavy of heart and weary after
a fruitless search all day for employment, to be greeted by his new
son-in-law. Alice at the moment was upstairs. With great tact and
delicacy De Soto hinted that Kent had better find quarters elsewhere,
for a few weeks at least. Kent was so overcome with joy to learn that
Alice at last had captured the elusive, reserved young genius--and
millionaire--that he fell in with the suggestion at once.
"I understand how it is, my boy," he assured De Soto, laying a fatherly
hand on his shoulder. "Just let me run upstairs and tell Alice how
happy I am, and I'll be off at once."
De Soto resented the "my boy" of his father-in-law, but did not show it
on his smiling face.
"By the way," he said casually, "since I am now one of the family, I
shall pay all bills." He unobtrusively slipped a handsome check into
Kent's hand. "As you belong with us by rights, it is only fair that I
should take care of your hotel expenses."
While Kent was upstairs bidding Alice adieu and almost crying with her
over this happy issue out of all their afflictions, De Soto paced the
dining room carpet like a trapped tiger. For the first time that he
could remember he felt maddeningly, stupidly ill. A hot prickling
tingled over every inch of his skin like needle points of fire. It had
first came on, faintly, while he was buying guinea pigs with Alice.
Although he gave her no hint of his distress, it had required all of
his self-control to act as if he were in perfect health. To one who
recalled only the easy sense of wellbeing of a young and healthy
animal, the first experience of illness was mental torture not to be
endured. De Soto was out of his depth. What should he do? Consult a
doctor?
Taking a grip on himself as he heard Kent's step, De Soto stopped his
feline pacing and stood rigidly still.
"Who is your family physician?" he asked in a level voice.
"Brown," Kent replied, somewhat surprised. "Most of your staff consult
him. Not feeling unwell, I hope?"
"Oh, no. But I thought Alice may have been doctoring with the wrong
man. She has looked rather pale the last few weeks."
"That will all mend itself now," Kent assured him. "You are the right
doctor for her."
The moment he was gone, De Soto bounded upstairs and tapped on his
wife's door. "It is Miguel."
"Come in," she cried in a low voice.
"Alice," he began, "can you ever forgive me for running away and
leaving you to dine alone? I have just remembered that I left a switch
closed in my laboratory. I must go back at once, or the whole place
may be wrecked."
"Can't you telephone to someone?"
"No. It is too dangerous."
Her face went white. "Let me come too," she begged.
"That would be worse than ever. I know exactly what to do. There is
not the slightest danger to me. Anyone else--" There was no need to
finish the sentence; he had produced the intended effect. "Don't
expect me till you see me--I may be hours."
She kissed him passionately.
"I won't be a drag on you," she declared, "even on our wedding day."
For reasons of his own, he went out by the back door. On his way
through the service port, he hastily emptied half a sack of potatoes
into a box and tucked the sack under his arm. In the patio he found
that the assorted pets he had purchased were all comfortably housed in
their respective quarters.
"I may as well do two things at once," he muttered, slipping two large
frogs and a pair of guinea pigs into the sack. "She might ask
questions if she saw me taking these away in the morning."
Unobserved by any of the servants he got the sack into Alice's car.
His immediate destination was Doctor Brown's house. At a drug store he
learned the doctor's address.
The doctor was just sitting down to a bachelor's dinner when the
housekeeper announced that Mr. De Soto wished to see him at once.
Brown rose with alacrity. He and De Soto had not met.
De Soto went straight to the point.
"Mr. Kent recommended you to me. For the past three or four hours my
whole skin has felt as if it were on fire. Will you examine me? I may
tell you that Miss Kent and I were married this afternoon."
"No wonder you are over-anxious about yourself," the doctor laughed,
concealing his shock at the news of Alice's marriage. If De Soto was
the man Crane thought him, poor Alice had been undeservedly punished.
Brown had always liked her.
"Is my condition likely to be serious?" De Soto asked, his vibrant
voice growing husky with repressed animal fear.
"Probably not. I treated a similar case successfully a short time ago."
A curious change came over De Soto's eyes. For a moment they might
have been those of a wild beast trapped and about to be killed. Brown
caught the flash. It convinced him that Crane was not far wrong in his
estimate of this young man.
"What was the patient's name?" De Soto demanded. His question was
harsh and hoarse with fear.
To Brown it was evident that De Soto suspected Crane of having used the
forbidden tube secretly.
"Oh," he replied, "the case I speak of was six months ago. What was
the man's name? Let me think. It was before you came here. He was an
assistant at the Foundation and got into trouble. You may have heard
of him committing suicide. I've got it. Bork. That was the man."
"Aren't you mistaken?" De Soto asked in a voice which he did not
recognize as his own. The question came from his lips involuntarily,
as if some personality deeper than his own were expressing a doubt.
"I think not. Why do you ask?"
"Ask what?" De Soto rubbed his hand across his eyes.
"You've been working pretty hard of late, haven't you? Take my advice
and lay off for a spell. You just had a slight lapse of memory then.
Well, the first thing is to ease your skin. We can do that here, in my
bathroom."
Brown himself gave De Soto his bath. The moment the patient was out of
the tub, the doctor hustled him into the dressing room and rubbed him
down thoroughly with disinfectants. He was not going to lose the
priceless bathwater this time, or have any third party see it pass from
pink to crimson.
"You will be comfortable for an hour or two anyway. I suppose you
won't want to go home until you feel sure you're cured. Did you tell
your wife anything?"
De Soto confided the fiction of the danger of the laboratory, but saw
no necessity for mentioning the sack and what it contained.
"Fine. Go to a hotel and spend the night there. Repeat the treatment
every three hours. I'll give you a prescription for some stronger
stuff. Telephone to your wife that the job at the laboratory will keep
you there till ten or eleven tomorrow morning. Come and see me again
at eight."
Promising to carry out the doctor's instructions to the letter, De Soto
left. The desk clerk at the hotel addressed him by name, feeling
highly honored to have as a guest the young inventor whose picture was
always appearing in the papers. De Soto got the best room and bath in
the hotel. Morbidly concerned about his health, he did not wait three
hours to repeat Brown's treatment, but did it at once with drastic
thoroughness. Then, cold with fear, he lay down to torture himself for
two hours with unreasonable fancies. Brown had assured him the other
man recovered quickly and easily. Would he? His fear of bodily
discomfort was not cowardice, but simply the natural reaction of an
animal experiencing its first pain.
The two hours passed without the slightest recurrence of the symptoms.
Encouraged, De Soto repeated the bath and disinfection, and lay down
again, this time with dawning hope. Luck stayed with him. And so it
went, with complete success, till two in the morning. Feeling that he
was free of his trouble for good, De Soto dressed and left the hotel.
The numerous bathings and rubbings had made him feel like his old self,
full of energy and eager for work. He got his car and drove to the
laboratory.
Chapter Eight--_TRAPPED_
Shortly before midnight, while De Soto in his hotel room was busy with
his prophylaxis, Crane descended upon the doctor to prepare for the
proposed raid on the forbidden laboratory. Brown knew that he was
taking his reputation, if not his life, in his hands by sharing Crane's
somewhat foolhardy enterprise. Nevertheless he was determined to go
through with it for scientific reasons as well as for the sake of
friendship.
Crane found the doctor peering through his binocular microscope.
"Anything new?" he asked.
"Not exactly. The same protozoa that you contributed to the cause of
science. This really is most extraordinary. Old Wilkes would give his
right eye for one look at these. They mustn't be exposed to the light
too long, or they'll vanish into nothing."
In answer to Crane's rapid fire of questions, the doctor explained how
he had secured his supply of protozoa. The announcement that De Soto
and Alice were married was received in silence. What could be said?
The time for talk was past.
"De Soto has blundered," Crane hazarded finally. "What it took thirty
hours for the two million volt tube to develop on my skin has shown up
on his in half a day. This must have happened after I left this
morning. My hunch is that he doesn't know what he is doing. Well,
shall we be going?"
"If you insist, we may as well." The doctor pocketed his flashlight
and a small medicine case. "I'll go and give Bertha her sleeping
potion and join you in front."
Forty minutes later the two rash men were outside the door of De Soto's
laboratory. Brown carried a large paper market bag in which the
drugged brown hen reposed limply and silently. There was some slight
difficulty at first in forcing the new key into the lock. Crane began
to swear softly.
"Hadn't we better give it up?" Brown suggested. "A superstitious man
would say our trouble in forcing an entrance is a sign from Heaven to
quit."
For a moment Crane was inclined to agree. His square-jawed obstinacy,
however, persisted.
"There," he whispered at last, as the key turned in the lock.
Before turning on the lights, Crane cautiously felt his way from one
window to the next, making sure that the iron shutters had been closed
as usual for the night.
"All safe," he announced, rejoining Brown by the door, and turning on
the lights. "Now to find out what friend De Soto thinks he is doing."
"Your key?" Brown suggested. "Hadn't you better leave it in the lock?"
"No. The watchman is not due this way for nearly two hours yet. But
suppose he were to come round out of his regular beat. If he found the
door locked from the inside he would ring till he was let in.
Otherwise he would just open the door, turn on the lights, look around
from here and lock up again. You must stand here and switch off the
lights if you hear anyone coming. I shall duck into that closet--where
the insulating togs are hung--and wait till he goes away again. After
turning off the lights, you sneak round behind that steel cabinet and
stand as close as you can to the window. The watchman won't see you
from where he stands. Take the hen with you, of course."
To forestall the unexpected, as all trained scientists do, the
conspirators rehearsed their parts six times before attempting any
experiment.
"Safety first," Crane grinned when the rehearsal ended. "The
unforeseen always happens. Turn off the lights till I give the word."
As a last precaution, he unbolted the iron shutters of the window by
which Brown was to stand in case of danger, raised the window, and
closed the shutters without rebolting them.
"If we're caught, you fling open the shutters and step out of the
window. Then beat it."
"And leave you to face the music? What do you take me for?"
"A man of common sense. Don't argue. It is as much to my advantage as
it is to yours not to be caught four-handed, as it were. The President
will take care of me. Your reputation would be gone forever. Now, do
as I say. I'm the captain here; you're a buck private in the rear
rank."
After much further argument Brown consented. The point that finally
won him over was quite unanswerable.
"We don't know what sort of rays De Soto's tube generates," Crane
remarked, reaching into the closet for a protective suit. "Let us take
no chances. Put on double armor."
Their preparations at last complete, they hopefully set about the
experiment for which they had come. Bertha, still soundly drugged, was
left in her sack by Brown's emergency window. If the tube generated
nothing more penetrating than even hard X-ray, the unsuspecting hen
would be amply dosed where she lay. But Crane, examining the curiously
compact mechanism of De Soto's little masterpiece, had an uneasy
feeling that the tube could emit radiations infinitely more dangerous
than the most penetrating rays known to human science. Trusting that
their double protection was sufficient, they tried to connect the
stocky little tube to the black devil box.
For five minutes Crane fumed and fussed at the ridiculously simple
terminals.
"Better take up your station by the lights," he snapped irritably to
the helpless doctor. "I can't seem to make it work. We may be fooling
here till daybreak."
Brown humbly retired to door and, to reassure his exasperated
collaborator, lightly laid his fingers on the buttons controlling the
lights. Crane had not the least idea of what he was doing. Accustomed
to the usual sputtering of ordinary tubes he naturally imagined that
nothing was taking place in the silent, dead-looking apparatus before
him. The transparent gloves, thinner than silk, seemed to interfere
with his manipulations. With a gesture of irritation, he started
pulling them off, when Brown sharply stopped him.
"Don't do that! How do you know that box is safe?"
"The box can't do any harm. It's the tube that counts. Why doesn't it
glow?"
The doctor's expostulation was cut short by a drowsy voice from the
window that seemed to ask "What?"
"The lights!" Crane muttered tensely.
Instantly the laboratory was plunged in total darkness.
Brown recovered his nerve first.
"That was only Bertha coming to," he laughed. "Shall I switch on the
lights?"
Crane assented, and once more began tinkering desperately with the
connections. Barely had he started when the lights went off again.
For the moment he forgot his own instructions to Brown.
"What's up now?" he fretted.
"Steps! Duck!"
As he shut the closet door noiselessly after him, Crane heard a key
being inserted into the lock of the laboratory door. Brown was already
in his station by the window, praying that Bertha would not continue
talking in her sleep. The door opened, and the lights were turned on.
It was De Soto carrying his sack. Neither Crane from his coal-black
closet, nor Brown from his station by the window could see who the
intruder was. The doctor wondered why the supposed watchman did not
turn off the lights and go away. To their horror both men heard the
door being closed, the key turned in the lock, and the sound of
confident footfalls advancing into the laboratory. Brown had the
additional discomfort of knowing that the lights were still on.
What followed was like a hideous nightmare to the three participants.
In four minutes history was made on a scale that would have paralyzed
the minds of at least two of the protagonists had they but dreamed what
their foolhardy tampering with forces beyond their childish
understanding would precipitate. Neither Crane nor the doctor saw in
De Soto's outburst of fury anything more significant than the
ungovernable rage of an overwrought man magnifying a real, but not very
important wrong, into a cosmic disaster. Their crass bungling had
unchained the devil. If any justification for De Soto's career be
possible, it resides in the history of those four epoch-making minutes.
According to his own account, he intended something quite different for
the world, and for Alice in particular, from his actual campaign. We
have only his word for all of this. But, in the absence of conclusive
evidence to the contrary, it is simplest to assume that De Soto was not
a liar.
The historic episode began with a hoarse, despairing cry from De Soto.
In one amazed glance, as he walked toward the black devil box, he had
noticed that the tube was fully connected as efficiently as if he
himself had linked up the twenty million volts to the evil fiend of his
own devising.
"I'm a fool like the rest," he wailed, dropping the sack with the frogs
and the guinea pigs. "I left it on!"
He darted for the closet to fetch himself a suit of the transparent
armor. Crane heard him coming, and squeezed himself into the farthest
corner behind three of the dangling shrouds. De Soto groped for a
shroud, gloves and overshoes without looking at what his hands grasped.
Shouting incoherent nothings he got himself into a single suit, and
darted for the devil box to disconnect the tube.
"I should have done this first," he raved, realizing his blunder too
late. "Fool, fool, fool! What am I?"
Bertha brought the tragedy to a climax. As De Soto's lightning fingers
disconnected the tube, a final surge of energy ripped the innermost
cells of her body apart. Although she was only a brown hen, that
exquisite pain gave her for a fraction of a second a voice that was
three parts human. Her croaking shriek rose shrilly above the
unnatural cries of the outraged guinea pigs and frogs in the sack,
whose innermost sanctity of life had also been violated in that abrupt
surge, and froze the fingers of the man blundering at the tube.
"What was that?" he yelled, his voice the cry of a lost animal facing
death.
As if in answer to his question an iron shutter seemed to open of
itself; a black mass hurled itself into the blacker night, and the
wailing shriek of the outraged hen receded into silence, and died.
Brown had escaped with his booty.
De Soto found himself staring in a dream at the fatal work of his too
penetrating intelligence. That it had ruined him was sufficient for
the moment. That his own imperfect mind, as he thought, had delivered
him up to failure in its worst form, was an ironic jest that cut deeper
than mere failure. His memory began to reassert itself. Surely he had
disconnected the tube before quitting the laboratory? A clear visual
image of the tube as he had left it, flashed on his retina. He rushed
to the open window and stared into the darkness. Who had robbed and
betrayed him? Crane? De Soto began shouting hoarsely for the watchman
who, having seen the light streaming from the window, was already
running down the walk to the laboratory.
The watchman as a matter of course began a systematic search. Within a
minute he had found Crane.
"All right," the latter remarked dryly, stepping into the light and
confronting De Soto. "I guess you've got me. What are you going to do
about it?"
His story was already made up, such as it was. In preparation for it
he had stripped himself of his protecting gloves, shrouds, hoods and
overshoes, and hung them up in the closet before the watchman opened
the door. De Soto regarded the suspect somberly before replying.
"How did you get in?" he demanded.
"I was passing here--having a look at things from the outside for old
times' sake," Crane grinned, "when I noticed the open window and came
in to investigate."
"You came in alone?"
"Presumably. The man who vanished in such a hurry when you unlocked
the door must have left the window open. He must be well acquainted
with the layout of this laboratory. Otherwise he couldn't have found
his way about in the dark."
De Soto affected to credit this theory.
"You had better tell the proper authorities in the morning," he said,
watching Crane's face narrowly.
"Of course, if you think it necessary. I will tell the President of
the Board, if you like, as soon as I can get hold of him."
"And you will agree to abide by his decision as to what is to be done?"
De Soto suggested with a malicious smile. Crane nodded. "Then," De
Soto continued, "I shall have to ask the watchman to search you. A
mere formality," he smiled, "so that I may be able to assure the
President that you were only safeguarding the interests of the
Foundation like a loyal alumnus."
"Rather rough on me, isn't it? What if I object to being searched
without a proper warrant?"
"None is necessary. You were trespassing. Search him."
The key was found at once. Although pretty far gone, the game was not
yet lost.
"Yours?" De Soto asked.
"Of course."
"Then you had a duplicate?" Receiving no reply, De Soto explained.
"To make sure that you would attempt nothing rash after your dismissal
yesterday morning, I asked at the office before going home whether you
had turned in your keys. They told me you had. This insanity on your
part confirms my suspicions. You were discharged, as you doubtless
guessed, because I had a strong feeling that you were spying on me.
Now, if you will tell me who your confederate is, I shall take no
action against you. Who is he?"
"I don't know what you are talking about. That duplicate key must have
been in my pockets for weeks."
"It is too new," De Soto pointed out coldly, holding it up for the
watchman's inspection. "For the last time, will you tell me who was in
here with you?" Crane's obstinate silence seemed to infuriate his
inquisitor. "You refuse? Then I shall turn you over to the police."
"What good will that do you? The trustees will believe my story--to
avoid a scandal, if for no other reason."
"You think so? Possibly you know them better than I do. Let me think
a moment." As if trying to make up his mind, De Soto began pacing back
and forth in front of his devil box. At last he appeared to reach a
decision. "Close that window, fasten the shutters, and go about your
rounds," he directed the watchman. "Lock the door after you. I will
be responsible for this man till you look in again."
"Now," he began when they were left alone, "there are no witnesses. We
can speak the truth without fear of the consequences. How long had the
tube been connected to the box when I came in?"
This tempting invitation to give himself away completely did not appeal
to Crane.
"How should I know? Whoever was in here may have been tinkering with
your apparatus for three minutes or three hours."
"So you refuse to talk? Very well; I shan't press you. Amuse yourself
till the watchman comes around again. I must see what damage has been
done."
Turning his back on his prey, De Soto strode toward the evil black box.
For half a minute Crane did not foresee his intention. Only when De
Soto began rapidly making the connections necessary to operate the tube
did the truth flash upon him. He was absolutely without protection
against whatever fiend De Soto, himself sheathed from head to foot
against the rays, might release. The memory of the unnatural cry which
Bertha had emitted when Brown--also protected as Crane was at the
critical moment--snatched her with him in his flight, roused every
instinct of self-preservation in the doomed man. One terminal was
already connected. De Soto's nervous fingers were about to close the
circuit by connecting the second, when Crane hurled himself upon his
inhuman enemy.
The unexpected impact catapulted De Soto against the black box and
flung him violently to the concrete floor. Before Crane could fall on
him, he had rebounded like an enraged tarantula and leapt to the
farther side of the box. Vaulting the box, Crane tried to seize the
desperately cool devil sneering into his face. De Soto kept him off
easily with one hand, while with the other he felt for the second wire
dangling above its binding screw. Crane's wiry strength was no match
for the perfect machine of bone, muscle and brain opposing him. The
free hand made the connection and began groping for the small button
switch that would release twenty million volts to surge into the tube.
The operator knew what the consequences to the other must be; the
intended victim could not even guess, except that they would be evil.
The all but human cries of the hen, and frogs and the guinea pigs
seemed to echo again through the laboratory. What would his own cry be
like?
Instinct saved him. Powerless to prevent the groping fingers from
finding their mark, Crane ripped the hood from De Soto's head in one
convulsive movement with all his strength.
"You know, then!" De Soto shouted, making a leap to recover the hood.
"I know you're crazy," Crane jeered, eluding him. He saw his chance
and took it. Before De Soto could pounce upon him, he had seized the
tube and hurled it to the floor.
"You fool," he gasped. "The next ten years in the penitentiary."
"Not if I know it," Crane retorted. "Any jury would let me off if I
told them what you were trying to do to me."
"What was I trying to do?" De Soto demanded.
"Nothing for the good of my health. That's all I know."
"You're insane. I try to find out what damage has been done to my
apparatus and you attack me like a madman. Explain that to your jury.
Also tell them that you deliberately wrecked my tube. Remember that
you were discharged on the suspicion of having tampered with it
already. Will you wait for the watchman, or will you come with me to
the police station?"
"Why not compromise? Suppose we talk these things over with the
trustees in the morning. After all, you are only the Director, you
know. This laboratory isn't your private property. That tube I have
just smashed and everything else in here belongs to the Foundation.
I'll meet you in the president's office at nine o'clock."
"So the trustees hired you to spy on me?"
"I'd be likely to tell you if they had, wouldn't I? Look at the common
sense of our row for a change, and give your imagination a rest. You
lost your temper and went clean crazy. Then you tried to give me a
dose of something you don't like yourself. It probably wouldn't have
killed me. You're not so crazy as that. But it might have done
something worse. You know best. I'm willing to go before the trustees
or the police, because I shall suggest that they find out exactly what
you are trying to do with your short waves."
To Crane's astonishment, De Soto began to rock with laughter.
"I will tell you," he confessed. "The trustees are good business men,
but they need educating. I planned to educate them. Now I have
changed my mind. They were too fond of money, I thought, and they used
my brains to flood the world with trash that only fools would want and
only imbeciles pay for. Without me they would still be poor. Now they
dream of owning the world. And but for my silly inventions the public
would never have dreamed that it could want the stuff it buys. They
asked me for rubbish because they could imagine nothing better to want,
and I gave it to them with both hands as I would shower idiotic toys on
a half-witted child. Like a fool myself I thought it would be a great
thing to show all of them the one thing that every rational animal
should crave."
"Which is?" Crane interrupted.
"Why should I tell you? Your prying incompetence may have wrecked my
work. And you, like all of the bunglers earning their livings here,
pass for a man of more than high average intelligence. Could you be
educated to want what I planned to give the trustees and all their
dupes? No. Nor can any living man or woman. So I shall change my
plan and glut you all with what you crave. You deserve nothing better.
Tell the president whatever you like. You can go."
"Before I do," Crane replied grimly, "let me tell you something for
yourself. I don't understand what you are trying to do, and your high
theories pass clean over my head. But I am sure of one thing. You are
lying. By dropping your charges against me, you hope to pull the wool
over my eyes. Well, you won't. I shall tell the trustees nothing."
De Soto laughed indifferently.
"Here's your key," he said, restoring Crane's duplicate. "Let yourself
out. But don't try to come back, ever again."
When Crane was gone, De Soto picked up the tube and examined it
critically. The damage could be repaired in two or three days or, a
new tube might be constructed in five weeks.
"I shall need batteries of these all over the civilized world," he
mused. "Then the golden age will dawn."
He locked up and walked slowly through the cheerless mists of the early
morning, thinking gloomily of his bride. She would have waited up all
night for him, he guessed, in spite of her assurance that she would not
be a drag on him in his work. All of his grandiose projects for the
human race had gone glimmering through no direct fault of his own.
Passing a dingy restaurant, he suddenly realized that he was faint from
hunger. Not until he had taken a seat at a slovenly table did the full
depth of the profound change which had overtaken him in the past three
hours register on his consciousness.
"A ham sandwich and a cup of black coffee," he said, without looking up.
"I don't need to ask Crane or anyone else how long that tubs was
connected," he thought bitterly as he sat sipping his coffee. "Six
hours ago this stuff would have stuck in my throat. Now I need it.
I'm not well."
Indeed he was not. Idly picking up the greasy menu, he began
listlessly reading through the list an item at a time. It did not even
occur to him at the moment that this was not his "natural" way of
getting the sense out of print. Exasperated by this unaccustomed
difficulty in following the meaning of what he read, he finished his
coffee, flung down a dollar, and left the place.
"How stupid," he muttered. "I forgot to bring the frogs and the guinea
pigs." His "natural" mentality began to reassert itself. He hurried
back to the laboratory and got his sack with the four animals.
Outwardly they seemed normal. What were they like inside? Only time
would show. The prospect of an interesting experiment cheered him up,
and he went straight home, to find Alice anxiously waiting for him in
the breakfast room.
"What have you in the sack?" she asked, when their greetings were
finally concluded.
"Oh," he lied readily, "some new pets. I saw them in the window of a
Mexican restaurant and bought them. Two guinea pigs and a pair of
frogs."
Alice was enchanted and De Soto, with a curious twinge as of some
forgotten instinct stirring within him, noticed that she was charming.
When had he been charmed by a girl before? He could not remember.
"Alice," he began after breakfast, "I have a queer sort of honeymoon to
propose. At first I had hoped that we might get away for a week or
two, but a turn in my work has put a trip out of the question. Suppose
you come down to the laboratory when you have nothing better to do and
watch me work? You can bring a book to pass the time when I'm too busy
to talk."
She was more pleased than if he had suggested a six months' pleasure
trip to the most frivolous playgrounds of Europe.
When Crane left the laboratory a free man owing to De Soto's
generosity, he went to the nearest telephone booth, learned that Brown
had arrived home safely with Bertha, and made a dinner engagement at
the doctor's house to talk things over the following evening. Both men
were too fagged to think clearly until they had enjoyed a long sleep.
Brown made arrangements with a friend to handle his practice and went
to bed, determined to sleep ten hours at least. Before turning in,
however, he took a pint sample of the bath water which De Soto had left
in the tub. wrapped the bottle in several thicknesses of black paper,
and left the package with a note for his housekeeper, requesting her to
send it, with his card, to Professor Wilkes by special messenger the
first thing in the morning. On his card he wrote: "Professor Wilkes.
Please examine this sample microscopically at once. The trick to keep
it from decomposing is to exclude all light. I will be at home after
seven tonight." This time he felt sure of himself.
The professor, duly instructed by Hayashi's microphotographs of the
protozoan fish parasites, would not pour the interesting sample down
the sink. Brown's forecast proved right. At four o'clock that
afternoon the housekeeper had almost to use force to turn Wilkes away.
The doctor, she asserted, had given the strictest orders that he was
not to be awakened till five o'clock. The professor left, lugging his
heavy brief case, which the housekeeper erroneously mistook for a
salesman's portmanteau. At six o'clock he was back, this time not to
be denied admittance.
At last Brown entered.
The professor, he decided, had suffered in silence long enough.
"Look at that!" Wilkes exclaimed with a dramatic gesture toward his
massive game.
"I don't have to," the doctor retorted. "I saw all that through the
microscope before you threw away my first sample."
"But they form a perfect series," Wilkes expostulated, "from the lower
species to the highest possible, and only the first half dozen of them
recorded. Over a hundred and eighty types of protozoa new to science
at one swoop? Where did you get them?"
"Where did Hayashi get his?"
"Diseased fish. But that all cleared up months ago. There has never
been anything like this in the history of biology. Where did you find
these?"
"I made them," Brown replied coolly, not expecting to be believed.
He wasn't.
It developed that Wilkes had spent the day making crude sketches, as
fast as his fingers would work, of the curious life--or rather
death--in the pint sample which Brown had sent him that morning. Most
of the sketches were mere rough outlines. Some, however, exhibited
considerable detail. These marked every fifteenth or twentieth place
in the long series into which Wilkes had arranged Hayashi's
photographs, a few of Brown's sketches, and his own. The effect, as
the eye ran rapidly down the entire series, was roughly like that of a
motion picture of a rosebud opening out in full bloom. Development of
some sort, not mere growth, was evident. The sizes of the creatures
depicted remained approximately constant; their complexity, however,
increased with beautiful regularity to its climax, reaching a maximum
at about two-thirds the total distance from the beginning of the
series, and falling steeply down the decline to degenerated simplicity
of structure at the end. It was as if a whole race of living things
were maturing to its peak, and toppling abruptly to its inevitable
extinction even as they watched.
"Well," said Brown. "Do you believe me now?"
"I will, when you tell me what to believe. I can't doubt my own eyes."
"Nor your own common sense?"
"What has common sense to do with it? We are face to face with a new
fact of nature."
"That's what I thought the first night I saw all this happening in a
drop of mist. But there is an explanation. It is so simple as to be
almost shocking. Haven't you guessed it?"
"More or less hazily. The time scale is all wrong. Impossible, I
should say, if--"
"If you hadn't seen it yourself. Excuse me a minute; that must be my
friend for dinner. You'll join us, won't you? It's Crane, the X-ray
man."
"Does he know anything about all this?" the cautious Wilkes demanded,
making a move to secrete his drawings.
"He should, as it was off his skin that I collected my first specimens."
On being presented to the excited professor, Crane modestly denied any
design in his startling contribution to biology.
"Doctor Brown," he concluded, "will probably have something more
exciting to show you soon. By the way, doctor, did you give Bertha a
bath after you got her home?"
"Great Scott! I clean forgot the possibility of her being infected as
you were. Excuse me a moment."
Left alone with the professor, Crane submitted resignedly to a barrage
of questions. How had he ever suspected the existence of these teeming
protozoa on his skin? Easily enough, Crane explained, adding that the
professor himself would have been in no doubt under the circumstances.
Venturing no theory, he went on to state briefly the beginning of the
whole story--his thirty hours' exposure, spread over several weeks, to
the hard X-rays generated by his two million volt tube, the suddenness
with which the intolerable itching began, and the immediate relief when
the superficial cause was removed.
"You are positive that your tube generated nothing but hard X-rays?
Well," the professor admitted on receiving Crane's fairly confident
assurance, "it must have been the prolonged exposure that started the
explosion--on your skin, I mean. None of the other biological workers
with mere X-rays ever produced such results. Not that they tried,
however; although now I fail to see why it never occurred to some of
them to do just what you did accidentally. Of course, there would be a
delayed, cumulative action under proper doses of the rays spread over a
long interval. The sum of all the doses applied in one shot might well
be fatal; it certainly would have a different effect from repeated
applications of small amounts. Isn't that so, Brown?" he appealed to
the doctor who had just reentered.
"Probably not," Brown laughed. "But I confess I did not hear your
argument."
Over the dinner table, Wilkes elaborated his not unreasonable theory,
letting his soup cool until the diplomatic maid removed it untasted.
Brown did not disagree. In fact he pointed out a similarity between
Wilkes' theory and the standard treatment by X-rays, whereby a strong
beam that by itself would seriously injure healthy tissue, is split up
into ten or more parts all focused on the desired inaccessible spot.
The professor was game.
"Don't laugh at me," he began, "and for Heaven's sake never tell any of
my colleagues that I ever talked such fantastic nonsense. Well, here
goes. It's an old story now how Muller, Dieffenbach and others first
managed to produce permanent modifications in certain living flies,
that were transmitted for generation after generation to the remote
descendants of the original flies. You recall how it was done; the
perfectly normal flies were exposed to X-ray, and then carefully
segregated and watched while nature took its usual course with flies.
They increased and multiplied. But some of the sons and daughters had
curious defects of the eyes and other peculiarities from which their
parents did not suffer. The sons and daughters were encouraged to mate
without having been treated by the rays, as their parents had been.
Their offspring inherited all the acquired characteristics. Thus it
went for generation after generation; the artificial modifications
initially produced by the rays were passed on from father and mother
fly to son and daughter fly, precisely as if the first freak were the
natural offspring of their parents--which they were not. It was as
remarkable, in its own way, as if a war veteran with only one arm
should have a son with only one arm--and the same arm, right or left,
and the son in his turn should have a son or daughter with the same
defect, and so on for generations."
"Don't you want any dinner tonight?" Brown interrupted, as the maid was
about to make off with the unviolated chop.
"Dinner? What's dinner in a crisis like this? Evolution has gone mad
before my very eyes. Here," he called after the maid, "please bring
back my plate. One must eat, even in a lunatic asylum. Now," he
continued, firmly spearing his chop, "consider what all this means.
Take the human race, for instance. We're mammals; you admit that. And
what are mammals, ultimately, but an offshoot of the reptiles? How did
they shoot off in the first place?"
"Don't ask me," Crane muttered guiltily, as the professor fixed him
with a flashing eye. "Brown ought to know."
"He ought to. But does he? No? Well neither do I," Wilkes exclaimed,
evidently well satisfied with himself. "But I have a theory--no, not
now. Later, when we get to the bottom of your new protozoa. What do
the biologists tell us?"
"You ought to know," Brown suggested. "Don't you make your living at
biology?"
"I do know!"
"The mammals sprang from the reptiles by a mutation--a sudden change of
species."
"Rot," Crane commented tersely and incisively, with the superior wisdom
of the physicist accustomed to manufacturing theories in the evening to
be thrown overboard in the morning.
To his great disgust, Wilkes unexpectedly agreed with him.
"Of course it is rot," Wilkes assented. "I know even better than you
that mutations explain nothing; they merely give a fancy name to the
fact we are trying to understand. Evolution by jumps, instead of slow,
continuous growth--there's another statement of the same thing. What I
want to know," he exclaimed, bringing his fist down on the table, "is
what causes these jumps. The physical reason--not a restatement of the
problem. Something suddenly took place in the germ cells of the
reptiles, and they brought forth strange creatures--no stranger than
those artificial flies with the queer eyes--that later evolved into
your ancestors and mine. Tell me that, and I'll rule the world!"
"Shall we tell him?" Crane asked with a dry smile.
"I haven't the heart," Brown replied in the same vein.
"He might pour us all down the kitchen sink."
The debate lasted well into the night, and, like most battles with
words, settled nothing. The real debate had not yet begun.
Chapter Nine--_BERTHA'S BROOD_
Some three weeks after Brown's dinner party, a puzzled electrical
engineer in New York sat reading and rereading the most extraordinary
letter that any human being ever received. The engineer was the once
celebrated Andrew Williams whose early patents on high-power
transmission remade the wholesale electrical industry and founded the
colossal fortune of the now defunct Power Transmission
Corporation--P.T.C. as it was known in its prime.
Vice-President Williams' brain had made P.T.C. both possible and
prosperous; Miguel De Soto's better brain had made it both impossible
and bankrupt. The decline of P.T.C. began when the Erickson crowd
captured all long distance, high tension power projects with their new
principle of electrical insulation. From decline to ruin was little
more than one stride, and P.T.C. took it. Overnight, when the first
great advertising campaign of the Erickson began to bear plums for its
sponsors, and thistles for its competitors, the stock of P.T.C. fell
from 180 dollars a share to 14 dollars and 50 cents. It was a washout,
and the unfortunate corporation was drowned. All that remained was to
wind up the affairs of the corporation--with the help of the somewhat
unsympathetic courts--and start all over again.
The letter which caused Williams such bewildered astonishment was
thirty pages long, typed in single space, and anonymous. No water-mark
or other identification betrayed where the paper might have been
purchased. The paper itself was rather peculiar for a business letter.
It was thin, light brown wrapping paper, such as is commonly used in
department stores for doing up parcels, cut to the standard typewriter
size. The cutting apparently had been done with a sharp penknife.
Although the typescript was plainly legible, the marks of numerous
erasures on every page indicated that whoever had operated the machine
was no skilled typist. The general appearance suggested that the
entire thirty pages had been painfully pecked a letter at a time. As a
last, significant detail, the type had all the earmarks of that from a
practically new typewriter.
Most sensible persons consign anonymous letters to the fire, If one is
handy; if not, they tear the letter into small pieces and entrust it to
the wastebasket. Williams, on looking for the signature and finding
none, was tempted to be sensible. The opening sentence of the letter
arrested his attention, however, and he read it breathlessly to the end.
"Sir," the letter began, "I herewith present you with the infallible
means for recovering all of your recent losses and regaining your
monopoly over the power transmission industry at no cost to yourself."
The letter concluded with the suggestion that Vice-President Williams
at once patent everything of value in the detailed specifications.
"My purposes," the anonymous writer asserted in a post-script, "are
purely humanitarian and educational."
For the twentieth time Williams scrutinized the large Manila envelope
in which the letter had come--unfolded. Only his own name, with the
words "Personal and Important" added, all in the same kind of typing as
that of the letter, offered any clue to the sender. Obviously no
detective could hope to trace the letter from these data alone.
Williams rang for his secretary.
"When was this envelope delivered?"
"I couldn't say. The office boy laid it on my desk at eight o'clock
this morning with the rest of the mail from our box."
The office boy remembered taking the large envelope from the mailbox
with the rest. There the clues ended. The Vice President again
summoned his secretary.
"If anyone asks for me, tell him I have gone to Washington, D.C. I'll
leave my hotel address at the information desk in the U.S. Patent
Office in case of an emergency. Don't expect me back for a week."
Williams had been a great inventor in his younger days, and he knew
that noble game from alpha to omega. Unless some crank were hoaxing
him by passing off as a free gift the work of another man already to be
patented, but not yet divulged to the general public, Williams felt
confident that he now held the world's tail in his right hand and a
sharp ox-goad in his left. And how he would make the brute sweat and
plod for him when once he started cultivating his rich opportunities!
Provided the genius who had invented this irresistible goad had not yet
filed the necessary papers, Williams cared not a damn for any moral
rights the man might have in his masterpiece; the legal technicalities
alone troubled him. Could he beat the cracked genius to the patent
office before the idiot repented of his insane generosity for "purposes
purely humanitarian and educational"? What wouldn't the rejuvenated
P.T.C. do to the overbearing Erickson with this pointed stick in its
capable hand?
From gloating over his anticipated revenge on his unscrupulous rivals,
Williams, gazing absently over the fleeting housetops from his seat in
the passenger plane, soon fell to speculating on his faithful
associates and superiors at the flattened P.T.C. Who among them all
had greatly concerned himself with the Vice President's comparative
ruin? Not one; their only concern was to salvage at least the rind of
their own bacon from the general mess. He, they intimated, was no
longer useful to them. Therefore he might go to the devil as fast as
he liked. Williams began to smile. His friends were no longer of
interest to him. Could they raise capital to finance the goad? They
could not. He, on the other hand, with an argument like this
patent--which he now felt sure of obtaining--could persuade all the
bulls and bears in Wall Street to dance jigs for his pleasure.
Williams, in short, was not one of those rare souls whom prosperity
does not corrode. Had he but guessed that his anonymous benefactor
intended by his gift that the recipient _should_ go to the devil, as
the P.T.C. had already hinted, his smile might have been less confident.
It must have been the very morning that Williams rushed off to the U.S.
Patent Office that De Soto rose much earlier than usual and, while
Alice still slept, stole out to the back garden to inspect his
menagerie of pets. For the past three or four days one of the guinea
pigs and both of the frogs which he had taken to the laboratory had
been acting strangely. In no case were their actions those of animals
in normal distress.
Walking slowly over to the cage where the ailing guinea pig lay, De
Soto took a firm grip on himself.
"In five seconds now," he thought, with a rueful laugh, "I shall know
how long that blundering fool Crane had left the tube running."
A sack had been laid over the top slats of the cage, as the light
seemed to irritate the prospective mother. With a firm hand De Soto
raised the sack and peered down into the cage. The miracle had
happened in the night. In one corner of the cage the wretched mother
cowered in unnatural fright, panting with terror. The eyes of the
stricken animal, already clouding at the approach of death, were fixed
on the farther corner, opposite her own, where lay the four things to
which she had given life against her will. De Soto had half expected a
shock. But even he was unprepared for what he saw. He replaced the
sack, strode to the garage, and fetched a shovel and a bottle of
chloroform which he had concealed in the tool cabinet a week
before--when the guinea pig first showed signs of distress. In ten
minutes he had done what was necessary.
He walked slowly back to the garage to put away the shovel. The half
bottle of chloroform being of no further use, he intended emptying it
and throwing the empty bottle into the rubbish can. Drawing the cork
from the bottle he started to pour out the remaining chloroform, and
paused irresolutely.
"I wish I knew," he muttered, staring moodily up at the window of his
bedroom. His bride of three weeks was still asleep in that room.
Whatever may be a man's abstract theories about humanity as a whole,
three weeks of marriage, and especially the first three, will modify
them in detail. Moreover, De Soto had undergone a profound physical
change the first night of his married life; he was no longer, mentally
at any rate, the man whom Alice had married that happy afternoon.
Among other discoveries of those three weeks, De Soto learned that he
was beginning to love his bride in the human and humane way of ordinary
men whom, three weeks before, he had despised. "I wish I knew," he
repeated, still undecided. A vivid image of what he had seen in the
cage with the dying guinea pig flashed into his mind. Hesitating no
longer, he recorked the bottle, and stole into the house. In the
kitchen he selected a clean dish towel and stuffed it into a coat
pocket. Then he crept upstairs.
Alice was still sleeping, her bare arms gracefully disposed on the
silken sheet, and her ruddy lips slightly parted like a child's. She
was smiling in her sleep as De Soto stealthily extracted the cork from
the chloroform bottle and drew the dish towel from his pocket. For
perhaps five seconds De Soto stood motionless, staring at her beautiful
face with something like dawning compassion in his eyes. Then he began
pouring the chloroform, a few drops at a time, upon the towel. As the
sweet, sickly odor flowed slowly down on the rosy face, the sleeper
stirred slightly and murmured a word that sounded like her husband's
name.
At last the towel was saturated, and De Soto laid the bottle
noiselessly on the floor. He straightened up, his muscles stiffened
for the inevitable struggle.
"Where are those flowers?" the sleeper murmured, now half awake.
"Miguel!" Her eyes opened fully, if drowsily. Instantly he thrust the
towel under his coat. "What is it?" she asked, starting up. "You got
up early?"
"Yes," he replied slowly. "I thought I smelt gas escaping from the
refrigerating plant. Do you get it?"
"I thought I was dreaming of acres of red roses. Now that you mention
it, I do notice a sweetish smell. Have you been downstairs to look?"
"No, I was just going when you woke up. Don't worry; I'm sure it's
nothing serious. I'll open the dressing-room doors and let it blow
out. Where are my slippers? Oh, here they are."
Bending down quickly he managed to secrete the bottle under his coat
while pretending to put on his slippers.
"Hadn't you better call the servants?" she suggested as he flung open
the doors of the dressing room.
"No," he laughed. "It's still nearly three quarters of an hour ahead
of their usual time. You forget that I'm a sort of glorified tinker
myself. I'll soon fix whatever is wrong. Now you take another nap; I
may as well stay up now that I'm dressed."
"If she hadn't opened her eyes," he muttered as he descended the back
stairs to the kitchen, "I could have done it. Now I never can. There
must be some other way of neutralizing it in her--if it has happened.
Why can't I think clearly as I used to think? Well, I can only try.
This blind fighting in the dark--"
Although De Soto did not know it, and indeed was incapable of realizing
the fact, he not only was changed but was also in the merciless grip of
a slow but incessant transformation.
The first three weeks of Alice's honeymoon had passed in a happy dream,
at least for her. Every morning she accompanied her husband to his
laboratory and passed the day pretending to read but actually following
his every movement with devoted eyes. She proved herself an ideal
companion for a desperately busy man, talking only when he showed an
inclination for talk.
Even in the first week Alice observed a curious change in the man she
worshipped. Mistakenly, she imagined that he was working too hard.
All the staff had told her such wonderful tales of the lightning
sureness of his mind, that it puzzled her to see him frequently
baffled. Unaware that she was watching his slightest movement, De Soto
would often sit for minutes at a time, turning some piece of apparatus
over and over in his hands, as if in doubt concerning its use, although
he had made it himself. These lapses became more frequent as the
construction of the tube progressed, until by the end of the third week
practically half a day would be wasted in futile scribbling or
blundersome manipulations. Alice became alarmed, and begged him to
take a rest, if only for a week.
His reply was a stare of surprise. Wasn't he getting along famously?
Why interrupt the work with the end in sight?
At length Alice could stand the suspense no longer. On the morning of
the day when De Soto had been tempted to destroy her, she asked his
permission to invite an old friend to dinner that evening.
"Of course," he agreed readily. "Who is it?"
"Doctor Brown. I haven't seen him since I was married, and he was so
good to father and me."
"Why not invite your father, too?"
She hugged him in an ecstasy of happiness, De Soto, for his part, felt
an unaccustomed uneasiness at the prospect of a meeting with Brown.
Would the doctor inadvertently refer to the strange disorder of which
De Soto had never told his wife? He must see Brown first and warn him
to be silent. Then a disturbing question echoed through his mind: Why
must Brown be warned? Surely there was nothing disgraceful in a man
keeping a passing sickness from his wife? Ah; De Soto remembered--but
not clearly. It mattered nothing whether Alice learned of his itching
skin, now permanently cured. No; but she must never hear of what
happened in the laboratory that night when he caught Crane trying to
work his tube. A worried frown darkened his face. Exactly what had
happened that night? The main events stood out fairly clearly, but the
details were blurred almost beyond recall.
"Alice," he said, "I guess I'll take a layoff next week, after I finish
my tube. It will be done this morning, I hope."
"Oh, how jolly! That's just what I've wanted you to do ever since we
were married. Only," she added in a low voice, her eyes shining with
unshed tears, "you seemed to think so much of your work that I never
dared to hint."
For some minutes he remained coldly silent. Then he said:
"Something happened a long time ago, when, I can't recall. But it was
so far away in time that it seems like a dream from another life. What
was it? Why can't I remember? And why should I always seem to be on
the point of meeting someone whose existence I have forgotten?"
"Never mind," she said soothingly; "it will all come back after you
have had a real rest."
As De Soto had prophesied, the new tube was finished and ready for
operation that morning. Shortly before noon it was connected to the
twenty million volt box, all but the last terminal which would close
the circuit and start the generation of the rays. Alice at the time
was pretending to read. Apparently she was absorbed in her story. De
Soto furtively studied her profile a full minute and then went to the
closet where the insulating suits were stored. Presently he emerged,
clad from head to foot in a double sheath of the transparent armor.
Alice put aside her book and laughed.
"How funny you look in those things! I never saw you dressed up that
way before. What's it for?"
"Oh, just for a fussy precaution," he replied lightly. "You see, there
might be a faulty connection that would cause a spark. This makes
everything perfectly safe, no matter if the whole box blows up. But it
won't, so you needn't worry. You stay over there."
He did not act in haste. As dispassionately as he could, he weighed
the probable consequences of what he was about to do. His penetrating
insight into the laws of nature was already clouding. Like the
ordinary man of genius he was now reduced to weighing probabilities and
selecting what appeared the least undesirable. Involuntarily shutting
his eyes he quickly turned on the full twenty million volts for an
instant, and then off again, by two quick twists of the screw switch.
The shriek that Alice emitted sounded scarcely human. Although De Soto
had expected it, his blood froze. Tearing off his hood he ran to her.
She had not fainted, but stood staring at him like a shadow in a dream,
her eyes dark with terror.
"What was it?" he cried, as if he did not know.
"Are you hurt?" she gasped.
"No. Don't you see? Why did you scream like that?"
"I don't know, For a second I thought you were killed. Then something
seemed to tear me to pieces--inside, here."
"Imagination," he boldly reassured her. "You feel all right now?"
"I suppose so," she admitted doubtfully. "But I feel--oh, how can I
express it? Changed." Then, after a pause she added in a voice which
he scarcely heard:
"Defiled and degraded."
"Nerves, Alice. You imagined that what I was doing was terribly
dangerous. Sorry I stirred you up by putting on all this ridiculous
fancy dress. When I turned on the current you thought I was killed.
Come on, let's go out to lunch and get some fresh air."
Still dazed, she sat down and waited until he removed his protective
armor and put on his coat. What had happened to her? Merely an attack
of nerves, probably, as he asserted. Yet she felt inhumanly unclean.
By a curious coincidence the warning which Crane had thrust upon her
recurred now with startling clarity. As if her old friend were
standing before her, she saw his face with her mind's eye and heard his
disturbing prophecy: "If you marry him you will kill yourself to be rid
of him." What did Crane know of her husband that she did not? Surely
nothing, she concluded reassuringly as her common sense regained the
control of her subconscious mind.
"I'm all right now," she said, and believed it.
On the way to lunch she telephoned to her father and Doctor Brown,
inviting them to dinner that evening. Both accepted eagerly,
especially Kent, who was longing for a sight of his daughter. Brown
looked forward to the evening with mixed feelings.
That evening Kent arrived first, three-quarters of an hour ahead of
time. After a decently cordial greeting, De Soto retired to inspect
his pets, leaving father and daughter together to discuss him to their
hearts' content. To the happy father's uncritical eyes Alice seemed
the picture of health and youthful happiness. Kent himself was in high
spirits. For a week he had been employed as booster-in-chief for a
go-getter real estate firm, and was enjoying his work tremendously. As
the time for Brown's arrival drew near, Alice hinted that she would
like to see the doctor alone for a few minutes. "About Miguel," she
explained. "He has been overworking. Suppose you go out and ask him
to show you his pets? He's crazy over them, and will let no one else
have any of the care of them." The bell rang just as Kent made his
escape.
"Well, Alice," the doctor greeted her, "this is just like old times.
How is everything with you?"
"I'm ridiculously happy," she laughed, "except for one thing. Won't
you drop Miguel a hint that he must take a long rest?"
"From what the men in the laboratory tell me, your husband isn't given
to long rests. Still, I shall do my best, if you wish it. What seems
to be the trouble?"
"First let me tell you that I spend my days in his laboratory, reading
and watching him work. He is usually so absorbed that he doesn't know
I'm there. So I can't help seeing him as he really is. And I have
noticed that he is dreadfully tired, although he does not know it. For
one thing, he has long lapses of memory."
"I'll speak to him," Brown replied decisively. "We can't afford to
have him unwell or you unhappy. What about yourself? Feeling pretty
fine?"
"Never felt better in my life," she began. An overpowering wish to
confide in her friend suddenly stopped her. Before she realized, she
had told him of the excruciating momentary agony she had experienced
that morning in the laboratory. "It was probably just an attack of
nerves, wasn't it?"
"Tell me exactly what happened."
She went into detail, describing the whole incident and De Soto's
explanation. Brown, of course, noticed the flaming fact that Alice was
unprotected while her husband neglected no precaution to shield himself
against possible danger. Like a good doctor, Brown's face betrayed no
concern.
"Miguel was right, wasn't he?" she concluded. "There couldn't have
been a leaky connection, or we should both have been killed. It was
just my nerves."
"Not a doubt of it. You take my advice and keep out of the laboratory
after this. The next time something real might happen. By the way,
you have no tingling or itching of the skin?"
"Not a trace."
"Then that settles it," the doctor assured her. From his tone she
inferred that he dismissed the flash of pain as a fiction of her
imagination. That of course was precisely what Brown meant her to
believe.
During the meal Brown concentrated his attention on De Soto, leaving
Kent and Alice to gossip of old times at the Foundation. Poor Kent, in
spite of his pride in his new job, longed for the fleshpots of his lost
dictatorship. A jealous note crept into his voice, and the doctor
overheard him surreptitiously expressing a hopeful belief that the
Erickson would come to a bad end. They were too grasping, he declared,
caring nothing for the common decencies of reputable business
competition. De Soto overheard the remark.
"I agree," he said quietly. "The trustees need educating."
"In what?" Brown asked.
"Human decency, if there is such a thing."
"Miguel!" Alice murmured reproachfully. "You know you don't mean that."
"No, I meant more." His voice rose. "The whole human race needs
educating. Why, I remember when I was a young man--"
"You can't be so very ancient now," Brown interrupted, with a curious
glance at his host's excited face.
It was an unfortunate remark. Something snapped in De Soto's brain.
Flinging down his napkin, he pushed back in his chair and leapt to his
feat, his black eyes blazing. Luckily no servant was present at the
moment. Speaking with great rapidity and in a low voice vibrant with
passion he delivered a flaming tirade against everything human. Alice
watched his face with something akin to terror in her eyes; Kent sat
open-mouthed and blank; Brown followed every word with rigid attention.
An alienist, knowing nothing of the facts, would have pronounced De
Soto insane. The very logic of his fantastic indictment was its most
damning feature.
Brown broke the sulphurous silence. With a significant glance at
Alice, which he interpreted correctly by kicking her father under the
table, the doctor began a cool cross-examination of De Soto.
"Your theories of human society are interesting but academic. How can
you put them into action?"
"Oh," De Soto laughed, apparently himself once more, "I can't. My
theories are just theories, nothing more. I thought they might amuse
you."
"They did. You seriously think it would be possible to educate human
beings out of their greed for what you call trash by stuffing them with
so much of it that they would rebel?"
"Not exactly. That would be merely the first step."
"And the second?"
"Give them different tastes. Even the cook and waiter had rudimentary
minds that the right process could work on."
"What cook and waiter?" Brown demanded quietly.
"I just told you."
Before continuing his examination, Brown shot Alice a warning glance.
"Of course," he said. "I forgot. Let us suppose you have made the
rest of us disgusted with the things we like. Would you give us
something better?"
"I was going to. But--"
"But what?"
"Oh, what's the use of theorizing? Leave it to history."
Brown changed his tactics. One or two statements of fact which De Soto
had let fall in his tirade needed attention.
"As you say, history will attend to our descendants--unless we find
some way of doing it ourselves. Another thing you said is more
interesting, I imagine, to all of us. You have always been rather a
mystery man, Mr. De Soto. We never knew that you spent some of your
earlier years in the United States."
"Neither did I," De Soto retorted with an amazed stare. "Who said I
did?"
"My mistake," Brown apologized. "But it seemed to me that the
conditions you mentioned could exist only in the United States."
"They exist everywhere."
"In the Argentine, for instance?"
"The Argentine?" The puzzled bewilderment on De Soto's face showed
plainly that he did not perceive the drift of Brown's question.
"I just used it as an example of 'everywhere'," Brown explained.
It was clear that De Soto either was lying or that he was so ill that
he remembered nothing of his early life. Kent was about to break in
when Alice silenced him with a warning look. She, too, had believed
that De Soto spent his youth in Buenos Aires.
The distressing party broke up early. At a hint from Alice, Kent left
immediately after dinner, saying he had to be up very early to keep a
distant engagement. Alice followed him to the door, leaving Brown
alone with her husband.
"Mr. De Soto," he began as soon as they were alone, "you are too
valuable to society to overtax your strength the way you do. If you
are not to squander all your talents in a silly nervous breakdown, you
had better take a long rest."
"I am planning to," he replied. "My work is practically done."
"Not all of it, surely?" the doctor suggested. "That's no state of
mind for a young fellow like you."
De Soto flared up again.
"What do you know of my age?"
"Keep cool. Don't fly into rages over trifles. As a matter of fact I
don't know your age, but I'd guess about thirty."
"Thirty?" De Soto echoed in astonishment, "Why, I was born--"
"When?" the doctor prompted. Receiving only a puzzled look, he
continued. "You have forgotten that, too. Your wife is right. Take a
lay-off."
Alice reentered, and Brown took his departure. She saw him into the
hall.
"Your husband will be all right," he reassured her, "if he lets up a
bit. If there is anything I can do for you at any time, please let me
know."
The doctor walked thoughtfully home, wondering what sort of a man De
Soto was at bottom. Was Crane right in his estimate, and if so, what
particular way was De Soto a thoroughly bad egg? Brown half doubted
his friend's opinion after seeing the suspect in action. More likely
the brilliant young inventor was merely eccentric.
As he passed along the south wall of his garden, Brown heard a
prodigious fuss from the hens in the patio. At this hour of the
evening they should all have been roosting and silent. That they were
active and excited in the dark, in flagrant contradiction of the normal
habits of the fowls, presaged some event of unnatural significance.
"Bertha's laid another," he exclaimed, hurrying into the house to fetch
his flashlight.
Since her involuntary adventure in the laboratory, Bertha had set out
to break the world's record in laying eggs. She had already broken the
record in the matter of numbers. The size, however, of her efforts
disqualified her. None of her numerous eggs had been a fifth the size
of a normal hen's egg. The shells, too, of these "pigeon eggs," as
Brown called them, were remarkably deficient in lime. Some were little
more than sacs of flexible white skin, like the inner sheath of an
ordinary egg.
The henyard was in a wild commotion. The doctor's flashlight revealed
an excited dozen or so hens pecking viciously at some dark red object.
This proved to be Bertha, her feathers drenched in her own blood. She
was dead, but still warm. Brown shooed the enraged hens away from the
body and placed it under an empty coop. Then he investigated.
From the evidence it appeared that Bertha had died defending her brood.
Eighteen of the eggs had hatched. Thinking for a moment that he had
gone insane, the doctor stared down at the dead hen's living offspring
writhing over the unhatched eggs. Then he scooped the lot, eggs and
offspring, into his hat, hurried back to the house and telephoned to
Wilkes and Crane.
"Come over at once. I have some things millions of years old to show
you, and they're alive."
Chapter Ten--_CAT AND MOUSE_
In scientific circles there are several semi-human periodicals which
contain, in addition to technical papers, brief personal notes
concerning the scientists themselves. For example, if Professor X. is
appointed to the vacancy created by the death or resignation of Doctor
Y., the fact is stated, so that the scientific friends of Professor X.
may know where to address him.
Crane, of course, took advantage of these free employment agencies when
De Soto discharged him, and sent in a note to each, saying that he was
no longer connected with the Erickson Foundation. He hoped to receive
at least one tempting offer before his bonus ran out. The hope was not
extravagant. Before De Soto's brilliance had eclipsed that of all
inventors in his own many fields combined, Crane was justly rated as
the best ray expert in the country. Hence, should some desperate firm
attempt to hold its own small corner of the field against the Erickson,
Crane was their most promising prospect, as De Soto seemed satisfied
where he was.
At last, five weeks after the evening when Wilkes and he responded to
Brown's excited telephone call, Crane received a three hundred word
telegram, signed Andrew Williams, President Universal Power
Transmission Company, offering him a royal salary as chief consulting
physicist. The telegram, while avoiding all details of technical
value, stated that the new company had been formed to exploit a
revolutionary invention for the transmission of electric energy. This
much occupied less than twenty words. The remainder of the telegram
was chiefly a roll call of the wealthiest business men in America.
"Hang it," Crane muttered, "I can't turn down an offer like this and
keep my self-respect. I shall have to accept, just as Wilkes and Brown
are getting to the most exciting point."
Before telegraphing his acceptance, he called on the president of the
Erickson trustees. This time the president bustled out in person to
greet his caller.
"Come into my office," he begged. "Well," he asked when they were
alone, "you have found something about the subject which we talked of
two months ago?"
"Nothing of commercial value," Crane admitted.
"Your opinion of Mr. De Soto is the same?"
"Yes. Only more so. I can't tell you why. But I am beginning to get
a definite line on him. By the way, did he ever tell you that I spent
an hour in his laboratory without his consent?" The president shook
his head. "I thought he wouldn't. Well, what I came about is this."
He handed the president the telegram from Williams. "It does not say
confidential," he remarked; "so there is no harm in your seeing it."
The president read it through slowly twice. Its commercial
implications for the Erickson were obvious.
"You will accept, of course?" said the president. Crane pointed out
that he would be a fool to refuse. "I agree," said the president.
"You will not forget us, I hope? We were not ungenerous to you."
"What can I do that your own staff can't? This invention must have
been patented before the company was formed. So anyone can find out by
going to the Patent Office exactly what it is. Why not send De Soto to
Washington at once? Even if the patents are ironclad to the ordinary
man, he will find a way."
"Do you mind if I show him this telegram?"
"I guess it's ethical enough. Go ahead."
De Soto was not in his laboratory. On telephoning to his house, the
president learned from Alice that her husband was not at home.
"Can you tell me where I could get in touch with him, Mrs. De Soto?
This is a most urgent matter; otherwise I should not dream of troubling
you."
"He had an appointment with Doctor Brown this morning at eleven.
Probably he is at the doctor's office now."
"Not unwell, I trust?"
"Oh, no. It was just about a personal matter."
De Soto was located at Brown's office. He promised to be at the
Foundation within half an hour.
When De Soto entered, he nodded curtly to Crane, and proceeded to
business.
"What is it?" he demanded.
"Doctor Crane advises that I show you this telegram."
De Soto was almost his "old" self for a few seconds. He took in the
sense of the long telegram at a glance.
"Electrical energy?" he questioned with a short, contemptuous laugh.
"So that's the sort of thing these great financiers gamble on, is it?
Serve them right if they get cleaned out. I have neither sympathy nor
patience with them."
"But," the president expostulated, "all of our own business is built up
on electrical energy in some form or another. What is to become of our
insulation if these people have something that beats it? And our radio
valves--everything we manufacture. Don't you see how serious this may
be for us?"
"No. It doesn't matter what they do."
"You know what they have?"
"I do not," De Soto snapped. "And what is more, I don't care. If I
did wish to learn, I should telegraph at once to Washington for a copy
of the patents."
"Hadn't I better do so?"
"Why? I can beat anything they do."
"Really, Mr. De Soto," the president demurred, "although we all have
the utmost confidence in your genius, I must say that your attitude
strikes me as a little too--how shall I say it?"
"Call it cocksure, if you like. I shan't mind, because I do know what
I am talking about."
"But consider this list of names for a minute. Would men of such
standing in the business world put their own money into a scheme that
wasn't gilt-edged?"
"They would, because they are uneducated fools."
"I must protest! These men--"
"Do so. And so shall I. In fact I have already protested in the only
way that counts. I call a financier uneducated when he puts a lot of
his money into a scheme that he does not know will win. As I said, I
can beat anything they do, and I don't mind if Crane tells them so.
They won't believe it."
"But what are we to do?"
"Nothing, for the present. Wait until they are in up to their necks.
Then I will finish their education by shoving their heads under. It is
either this or nothing. If they are right, we are ruined; if I am
right, they are ruined. We can't compete with them on their terms--if
they have what they think they have. And neither can they compete with
me, if I have what I think I have. Our policy is plain--wait."
"May I suggest a third possibility?" Crane interjected, as the
president was about to reply. "Mr. De Soto says either they or we
shall be ruined. We might properly consider the case in which neither
is ruined."
"Impossible," De Soto snapped.
"All right," Crane retorted. "There is only the fourth thing possible."
"There is no fourth," the president objected.
"Oh, yes, there is. There are four possibilities, and only four.
We've discussed three. The fourth is the least pleasant of the lot.
Both we and the other crowd might be ruined."
"But how?" the president demanded, missing the ominous flash of De
Soto's eyes which Crane observed. "Industry must have electrical
energy. How can they lose, provided we also lose?"
"I'm sure I don't know," Crane admitted. "I'm not a great inventor."
And there the matter rested.
Before taking the train that night, Crane went to bid the doctor
goodbye.
"I hate to rush off and leave you and Wilkes just as things promise to
get exciting. But what can I do? Offers like this don't come in every
mail."
"It's the only sensible thing to do," Brown agreed heartily. "I'm glad
you had time to drop in. There is a new development." His face
darkened. "Professionally, I have no right to tell you. But in this
case we are beyond ethics. I shall also tell Wilkes. We three are the
doctors in this case. What I tell you must go no farther."
"I promise."
"Alice called me in this morning. She is to have a child."
"Good God! What will you do?"
"Take care of her, of course. She asked me to."
"But--"
"I know. Or at least I don't know. Neither does her husband. He came
to see me this morning, after I got back from visiting her. I believe
he has blundered and tried to correct his mistake. But he is not sure
of anything."
"Did he tell you?"
"No. It would be impossible for him to commit himself beyond the
vaguest suggestion."
"Of course. What did he say?"
"Nothing true or of any unmistakable consequence to us. He merely
insinuated that Alice's health is not good enough to stand the strain.
Having just examined her, I knew that he was lying, and I suspected him
of wishing me to know that he was lying in what he considered a good
cause. You see, of course, he could give no hint of what may be in his
mind. As I said, I feel that he himself is not sure of his ground.
Still he does seem to suspect that he may have failed. What could I
do? I was bound professionally, to ignore his suggestion."
"What if he consults some other physician?"
"How can he? Any physician who would do what he hints--and there are
plenty, I admit--would not be safe. A reputable man is the only one
who can be trusted in a case like this."
"But there hasn't been another case like it, if--"
"Not exactly; that is true. But there have been several on the same
level ethically. You see what I mean."
Crane brooded miserably in silence for some moments.
"I wish she would die," he said at length.
"So do I," Brown rejoined.
Six days later, in New York, Crane and his new employers held their
first conference over the epoch-making invention which, according to
President Williams, was to revolutionize all industry.
"What do you think of it, Doctor Crane?" Williams beamed. The patent
papers and a rough, small scale model lay before them.
"It's a washout," Crane admitted. "By the way, you haven't told me the
inventor's name."
Williams laughed obesely. "I thought you physicists were keen
observers. The name is plastered all over the 'Evidence of Conception'
alone, to say nothing of the final patents."
"So I observed," Crane remarked dryly. "But you haven't answered my
question. Who invented the thing?"
There was an ominous silence. Williams' face lost its oily joviality
as he glared at Crane, and the consultants of the staff fixed their
chief with doubtful, questioning eyes.
"Do you mean to insinuate," Williams demanded in a voice that cut like
steel, "that I did not invent this method of power transmission?"
"Not at all," Crane responded promptly. His tone was conciliatory.
Instantly it changed. "What I mean is this. You are a ... liar and a
thief."
Williams leapt to his feet, trembling with rage.
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said. You did not invent this. I have known of your
work for years--ever since I was a sophomore at the University. It was
good stuff--no doubt of It. But the best you ever did was not within a
million miles of this." He paused, to emphasize his point.
"Gentlemen," he said, addressing the staff, "it is as impossible for
President Williams to have made this invention as it would have been
for the village idiot of Stratford-on-Avon to write 'Hamlet.' You see
the point? President Williams' own stuff is several thousand levels
lower. Therefore, I say, he stole this invention."
The silence grew oppressive. Williams broke it.
"You may leave me to settle with Doctor Crane," he said to the silent
group. "This is a personal matter. Unless," he added, addressing
Crane, "you prefer to apologize publicly?"
Crane shook his head and the staff filed out.
"Now," Williams began when they were alone. "You will withdraw what
you said."
"How do you know? As a matter of fact I shan't. I don't want your
job."
"You have no job, Doctor Crane. I was not offering you a chance to
retract and be taken on again. It is now merely a question of whether
you wish to stand suit for libel. The staff heard what you said."
"I'll say it again, if you'll call them in. And I'll tell them who
made that invention, if they care to know."
"Who do you think made it, if I did not?"
"Miguel De Soto. It has all the earmarks of some work he has been busy
on since he joined the Erickson. I would recognize it in my sleep.
How did you get hold of it?"
Without a word, Williams rose and opened his private safe.
"You know too damned much," he admitted with a cynical laugh, thrusting
a thirty-page anonymous letter into Crane's hands. "What do I care who
knows where I got the stuff? It's mine, and I have the patents."
Crane read the letter through. The only point of interest to him was
the postscript: "P.S. _My purposes are purely humanitarian and
educational_."
"Well?" Williams demanded as Crane handed back the letter.
"I knew it. De Soto invented your wireless power transmission. The
postscript would give him away at once to the President of our Board of
Trustees. De Soto is a bigger fool than I thought he was. He has
blundered again."
"How?"
"By mentioning education. It's too long a story to hash over again.
Besides, what is there in it for me?"
"If you know any facts of value, I could see that you are well paid."
"All right, I know one fact that will save you hundreds of
millions--possibly a billion or two."
"How much do you want for it?"
"One hundred thousand dollars, paid in advance, in thousand dollar
bills--common currency. No stopped checks for me."
"I'll consider it if you tell me why De Soto sent me that letter."
"Because he knew you would bite."
"Then you consider the invention deficient in some detail we have
overlooked?"
"Not at all. It will work."
"Where is the catch, then?" Williams demanded.
"I don't know."
"Yet you have a suspicion?" Crane nodded. "Very well," Williams
concluded, "I'll give you a hundred thousand for your fact. What is
it?"
"Easy. Write out this: 'I hereby pay to Doctor Andrew Crane, for
technical services rendered, one hundred thousand dollars in U.S.
currency, thousand dollar denominations, numbers'--leave space to write
in a hundred long numbers. Then you come down to your bank with me and
get the bills. We'll have your signature witnessed by the cashier and
a couple of clerks, and the numbers of the bills written in. Then you
can't stop anything on me--unless you hire a gunman."
"You must think we're crooks," Williams retorted coldly. Nevertheless
he wrote. "My backers have billions," he added with a touch of
snobbery.
At the bank Crane refused to divulge his 'fact' until the bills were
safely in his pocket with the duly witnessed statement.
"Now," Williams demanded when they reached the street, "what's your
tip? You have your money."
"Just this. Throw away the invention and dissolve your company."
Williams glared at the lanky young man before him in speechless rage.
"You--" he sputtered.
"Keep cool. That tip is worth all the money your crowd has. If you
touch the invention, De Soto will break you."
"How do you know?"
"Because he told our president so just before I left. I heard him. Of
course he did not tell us that he had made a free gift of this
invention to you. Some things are better left to the imagination."
"But why--"
"Because he hates your methods of doing business."
"What about your own?" Williams flashed.
"The same there. He doesn't like any of us. My idea is that he plans
to break all of your crowd first and attend to us later. What he
doesn't know about the business mind isn't worth knowing. He knows
that all the big money in America would fall for a sure thing-it
certainly looks sure enough--like the wireless transmission of all
electrical energy at a tenth of a per cent. of what transmission costs
now. Who wouldn't? I'd have fallen for it myself, if I hadn't known
De Soto. Can't you see? It's all so simple. Your crowd puts all its
cash into a sure bet and finds out the day after tomorrow that there is
no market for what it sells. Where are you? In the soup. It will
cost money--lots of it--to manufacture this device on a world-beating
scale, as you intend. Go to it; De Soto will bankrupt you the day you
begin to market."
"If I thought you knew what you were talking about," Williams muttered,
"I would call it off now. We've already spent four hundred and fifty
million in buying up strategic locations for our plants."
"Better swallow your loss and back out. You'll be smashed. Call it
off. De Soto is a hardboiled Tomcat and you're an innocent little
mouse."
"I'll see it through," Williams said decisively. "This can't be
beaten. You're welcome to your fee."
"Thanks. And you are more than welcome to my tip. If I can be of
further service, here's my address."
The game was now becoming fairly clear, especially to Crane, who knew
certain facts not yet divulged to the commercial world. Feeling that
his loyalty--if he had any--was still to the Erickson, Crane did not
wait for the slow transcontinental railway service to get him home, but
engaged passage on the combined express and passenger plane routes.
Twenty hours later he was in Seattle, telephoning to the president of
the Erickson Trustees.
"I'll be at your room in fifteen minutes," the president promised. And
he was.
Crane's report was disturbing enough. What could be De Soto's object?
"I can't understand him," the president admitted after a two-hour
session during which every aspect of the singular situation was
minutely examined.
"He hasn't your interests at heart," Crane remarked quietly. "As I
told you the morning he fired me, he hates your guts."
"I'm not so sure," the president demurred. "De Soto is a genius, in
business as well as in invention. How do you know but that this scheme
of his to trap all the big fellows isn't just a fine evidence of his
loyalty to us? After all we have treated him handsomely. What more
could he ask? We've deferred to his slightest suggestions. Who made
him rich? We did. No; I believe De Soto will make good and show us
how to break the Williams crowd flat."
"The biggest smash in the history of American big business," Crane
mused. "When it comes, let me know. I'm putting my pennies in a
safety deposit vault till De Soto is shot. Now," he continued with his
slow grin, "if I really loved humanity I would go out and shoot De Soto
now, instead of waiting six months or a year for some busted banker to
finish the job as it should be finished. I know a lot about our friend
that you don't."
"What?" the president demanded, going white in a panic.
"I can't say yet. The information isn't mine to give out."
"Then who can say?"
"That would be telling. I've said my say. My advice to you is the
same as that I gave Williams. Fire De Soto, shoot him, have him locked
up--anything you like--but get from under him at once. Otherwise he
will explode and blow you and all your crowd into little bits. Do I
get anything out of this?"
The president reached for his cheque book.
"If Williams could afford to fee you, I guess we can. We're not
paupers yet. I shall watch De Soto."
Crane nonchalantly glanced at the cheque.
"Thanks," he said, concealing his elation. "Take my advice and get
out. Let the Williams crowd swallow the loss."
The president decided to take the devil by the horns.
"Would you care to come with me and repeat your story before De Soto?"
"Not in the least. Where is he?"
"At home, resting. Mrs. De Soto is not very well, and neither is he, I
imagine."
"All right, I'm game, provided we don't run into Mrs. De Soto," Crane
agreed. "The last time I called on her she was Alice Kent. She showed
me the door. So make this strictly a business call."
They drove to the house and were admitted at once. Alice did not
appear to greet them. It was a full ten minutes before De Soto entered
the reception room. When he did, a strong odor of chloroform
accompanied him.
"One of my pets was suffering," he explained, seeing that they noticed
the smell. "Excuse me for having kept you waiting. Mercy first," he
concluded with a strange smile.
"Pardon me for coming to your house on a business matter," the
president began, "especially as you are not feeling very well. But I
thought you would be interested in hearing Doctor Crane's report of
what happened in New York."
"I can guess it," De Soto replied indifferently. "You remember that I
gave him my permission to tell Williams that I can beat anything his
firm does. Crane told him; Williams didn't believe him. Is that how
it stands?"
"Exactly," the president nodded.
"And you wish me to make good on my brag--as you thought it was?"
"It seems to me, Mr. De Soto, that we have no time to lose."
"I agree. Shall I come to your office at three o'clock this afternoon?
Very well. Please ask the technical staff to be present. I shall
explain to you and the other trustees exactly what I propose to do. To
the staff I shall give only the necessary instructions for making
full-size instruments for demonstration purposes. The finishing
touches must be done by me when the technicians have completed their
part--say about eight or nine months from now. Then, with the
perfected apparatus in our hands we can get our patents in short order,
just as the Williams crowd is beginning to sell. We shall scrap all of
their plants and the rest of their investment overnight. To
manufacture their device on a world scale--which is what they will
do--will take practically all of their capital. They won't be content
with the American demand, but will strike from the first for the world
market. Let them; so much the better for us. In half an hour, or in
one hour at most, I will destroy their world market before they have
delivered a single transmitter."
"But how?" the president doubted,
"Later--eight or nine months from now. Let me have a little fun and
I'll give you the world to play with. All I ask is the opportunity,
when the time comes, to wreck them utterly in half an hour. I'll make
it spectacular," he laughed. "No one shall get hurt--except Williams'
hand-picked mob of moneyed easy-marks. They'll be flattened.
Financially, only of course. Then you can step in and take the world
market they have paid for with their millions of dollars' worth of
bribed publicity. If I can't convince you this afternoon you may
forget the second."
The president was almost convinced. Still, the fact which Crane had
uncovered regarding the origin of the "Williams power transmitter,"
caused him a twinge of uneasiness.
"Is Doctor Crane right," he asked, "in thinking that you sent Williams
a thirty-page letter containing the invention they are exploiting?"
De Soto flung back his head and laughed.
"Of course he is right," he chuckled. "But did either of you know that
I guessed Crane would see that letter and report what he did? The
moment he told me he was going to join Williams' firm, I foresaw
everything that has happened--even to this talk and your last question."
"But you wouldn't play a trick like that on us? We gave you your
opportunity, remember."
"I shan't forget. Haven't I made good use of your generosity? Here I
am offering you the world--that is what your monopoly will amount
to--and you look for the trademark to see if it is bogus. Of course it
isn't!"
"I can't see," the president objected, "why you have gone to all this
trouble to deceive Williams if you have something that beats his
scheme--your other one, by the way--out of sight. Wouldn't it have
been simpler to have started with the winner? Think of the time we
shall lose--nine months, you say."
"And you a business man!" De Soto said reproachfully. "With all your
possible competitors eliminated before you start, you can gobble up all
the markets they might have controlled--wheat, cotton, oil,
everything--if you had left them any capital to gamble with. But they
will be bankrupt, all their wealth squandered on the one key monopoly
they thought they were going to get, but which actually you will have.
It is the world I am offering you, I tell you! And you begin to cry
because you can't get it for a short eight or nine months. I'm almost
disgusted with you," he exclaimed with sudden petulance.
"Don't think me ungrateful or over-suspicious," the president begged.
"But as a business man I perhaps see some things more clearly than you,
a scientist, possibly can. You say these men will be ruined overnight.
Capital can't be destroyed that suddenly. These men are solid--the
soundest in America. Their money is not paper. Steamship lines, great
banks, whole cities of office buildings, farm lands, timber, and a
dozen other tangible things are their actual fortunes. This is no
fight on the stock market. We are attacking real assets. Have you
thought of that?"
"Yes," De Soto replied wearily. "I know my economics. Also I know my
human nature. To build plants to manufacture the new transmitters on a
smashing scale, to advertise wherever power is sold or used, to get the
sales force into the world field, all of this will require real money
by the shipload. And where will our competitors get it? From loans or
bonds on all those tangible things you catalogued. Who will lend money
or buy the bonds? Not the big men, as usual, because they are
borrowers this time. They will get it from smaller men, little banks,
conservative investors, and the great public at large. All these will
inherit the big men's office buildings, farm lands, timber and the
rest. Then we shall step in and take it all away, for we shall control
each and every industry from raw material to ultimate consumer. So
much for economics. The human nature of it is even simpler. I needn't
explain."
"Perhaps not," Crane agreed. "But would you mind telling us how you
got that letter delivered to Williams?"
"Ah," De Soto replied sarcastically, "there is a real problem. How
would you have solved it?"
"Private messenger, provided I could find one I could trust."
"Good. Just what I did."
From the tone in which he said it, Crane inferred the contempt in De
Soto's answer. It seemed to say, 'Here I am offering you the world and
you turn aside to fiddle over a trivial problem that an idiot could
solve.' The talk was suddenly interrupted by the sound of firm steps
descending the stairs. Through the arched doorway Crane saw Brown
coming down with his black bag. Excusing himself De Soto hurried out
to intercept the doctor.
"Mrs. De Soto is quite ill, I understand," the president confided in a
low voice. "Did you notice how nervous and worried De Soto looks? His
color is bad, and he has aged ten years."
"I have noticed the change in color for some time," Crane replied.
"We have tried to make him let up on his work," the president sighed,
"but he won't. Some research of his own, he says, has reached the
critical stage, and he must carry it through now or lose everything."
"Did he tell you what its nature was?" Crane asked, thinking of the
smell of chloroform which followed De Soto.
"Something to do with the cosmic rays, but I'm not sure."
Crane wondered whether the research had anything to do with animals.
If so, the strong odor of chloroform would be explained.
"If you have finished with me," he remarked, "I may as well go.
Probably you and De Soto will have matters to discuss."
"Aren't you coming to the conference this afternoon?"
"I had better not. You see I am no longer officially connected with
the Foundation. De Soto might resent my 'spying,' especially as he
suspects my feelings toward him. If anything important happens, you
can let me know, if you think it wise."
In the hallway De Soto and Brown were conversing in a low tone. Seeing
Crane, the doctor stopped short with an exclamation of surprise.
"You back? What happened?"
"Fired as usual," Crane grinned. "Only I fired myself this time. I'll
wait for you outside."
When Brown joined him on the sidewalk, Crane briefly summarized his
adventures in New York and his conference with De Soto and the
president.
"The hundred thousand," he concluded, "with what the president gave me
as a tip are enough to make me independent for life. My tastes are
rudimentary. Now I can get to the bottom of what friend De Soto has
started." He hesitated. "If it isn't a breach of professional
etiquette you might tell me how Alice is."
"Everything is apparently normal. If it were an ordinary case I
shouldn't have bothered to call. Young husbands are always so fussy in
these circumstances that we usually pay no attention to their
worries--they mean nothing. But with Alice, of course, I can't afford
to take any chances."
"You say she is quite normal?"
"Yes," the doctor admitted hesitantly, "except that she is too anxious.
There is something not quite natural about her worries."
"I shouldn't wonder," Crane muttered, and changed the subject. "Wilkes
is still determined to present his paper at the meeting of the
Biological Society?"
"You know how he is. I've been trying to talk him out of it ever since
you left, but he insists. Do you want to come along and see the fun?
I shall go, of course, if I can get away."
"Sure," Crane exclaimed. "That's why I made Williams fire me. I
wouldn't miss that meeting for a million dollars--and I've only got two
hundred thousand. It's tomorrow at ten, as scheduled?"
"Ten o'clock, in the university auditorium. Wilkes' paper is first on
the program. Well, I must run along to see an old lady with gas. See
you tomorrow at the meeting."
"How are your pets coming on?" Crane called after him.
"Too well," the doctor replied grimly. "I've had to build a high
concrete wall round my patio."
Chapter Eleven--_THE TOAD_
"The man is here about the chickens," the housekeeper announced the
following morning just as Brown was about to begin breakfast.
"What does he want now? I paid him for grain yesterday."
Nevertheless the doctor went out to see what the male harpy sought.
Since Bertha's death the doctor had given up keeping chickens on his
own premises. Not having the heart to sell his feathered family to the
poulterers, he had pensioned them with a farmer in the country. This
genius knew a soft thing when he saw it.
The pest extracted a dollar from the doctor--"for grain," he said--but
showed no disposition to leave.
"What are you raising now?" he demanded inquisitively, pointing to the
twelve-foot concrete wall with the heavy, solid wooden gate.
"Skunks," Brown briefly informed him.
"For their fur?" the pest persisted.
"No, for their perfume. The Chinese say it is good for rheumatism.
I'm going to try it out on some of my patients."
And with that the doctor left the skeptical farmer scratching his head
and returned to his breakfast.
After breakfast he drove over to the university. Being on the program
committee of the Biological Society, he wished to be at the auditorium
well in advance of the meeting.
"What's this stuff old Wilkes is springing this morning?" a somewhat
flippant young man in rimless glasses demanded. "He's down on the
program for a paper on 'New Light on Evolution.' Where did he get it?
Wilkes hasn't had a new light on anything for the past twenty years.
Do you think it will be worth hearing?"
"'He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,'" Brown quoted with an
enigmatic smile and passed on.
"Now what did he mean by that?" the cocksure young man muttered,
unconsciously scratching his left ear. Wilkes' paper had been accorded
the place of honor on the program, also the unusual time allowance of
forty-five minutes. This was solely due to Brown's earnest persuasions
with the committee. The other members took the doctor's word for it
that he had carefully gone over the paper and that it was of the first
importance. As ten o'clock drew near Brown began to show traces of
nervousness. What if Wilkes overdid things and made it too
sensational? The society would jump all over him. To ease his
feelings, he fussed about the lantern and the motion-picture machine,
heckling the operator with unnecessary directions.
"Run it through in slow motion first," the doctor emphasized for about
the twentieth time. "Then give it to them as fast as you can without
blurring."
"Sure, I understand," the operator replied gruffly. "You told me
before."
"If you foozle it--" The doctor hurried for the platform. It was time
to open the meeting, and the chairman was still smoking in the lobby.
Just as Brown reached the door De Soto sauntered in and took a front
seat.
"Hullo," Brown exclaimed under his breath. "He suspects someone. I
hope it isn't me." Going over to De Soto, he gave him a hurried
greeting. "Mixing a little biology with your physics?"
"Only a little," De Soto smiled. "I saw the title of Wilkes' address
in the paper and thought it might be amusing."
"It will. The old chap has something brand new." He lowered his
voice. "How is Mrs. De Soto this morning?"
De Soto's face clouded. "Nervous again. I made her take some of what
you prescribed. Could you drop 'round to see her some time today?"
"Certainly. I'll go as soon as Wilkes has read his paper. Excuse me
now; I've got to start things going."
The chairman regretfully flung away his half-smoked cigar, mounted the
platform and called the meeting to order.
"The first paper is entitled 'New Light on Evolution,' by Professor
Wilkes." He turned and nodded to Wilkes, who sat in the front row not
far from De Soto. "Professor Wilkes."
Wilkes gravely mounted the platform. The curious audience of some
three hundred expert biologists and intelligent amateurs with an
interest in evolution noted that the professor had no manuscript in his
hand.
"Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen," he began and proceeded at once to
scientific business. "The first slide, please."
The hall was darkened and a beautifully executed microphotograph was
projected on the screen.
"Old stuff," one skeptical expert whispered to his neighbor. "He got
that out of Blair on the protozoa."
"Next," Wilkes requested.
"Blair's again," the skeptic whispered.
"Next."
"If he's going to show us all the protozoa in Blair he won't get
through till this time next year."
"Next."
"Hullo! Where did he get that one!"
"Next, please."
"Another, by Jove! Caught in the very act of dividing."
"Next."
"Fake," more than one expert whispered.
"Run them through more rapidly, please," Wilkes directed the operator,
"one at a time."
As fast as he could change the slides the man at the lantern flashed on
approximately a hundred photographs of the simplest animals known to
science, the living things which consist of but a single cell. The
exhibition was received in uncanny silence. Experts held their breath
amazed at the magnitude of what they were seeing--provided it was all
genuine--or grimly waiting their chance to pounce on the audacious
Wilkes should he prove to be hoaxing them.
The long series of individual slides came to an end.
"The motion pictures now, please," Wilkes requested.
The fruit of laborious weeks of toil by Wilkes and Brown was now slowly
unrolled in a coherent sequence on the screen. The spectators saw a
different succession of protozoa gradually evolving before their eyes.
Types of the utmost simplicity survived through their transient
generations, passed out of recognition as individual species and
bloomed into new life, more complex and more highly specialized than
their ancestors, and those again gave place to higher forms. The
history of a million years flashed by every five seconds, and still the
general trend was upward toward diversified perfection and increased
richness of life. Gradually the rate of ascent slackened. The
millions of years represented by sixty seconds of the moving film
revealed no discernible variation in the structure of the minute,
perfected creatures; they seemed to have passed forever into their
perennial Golden Age. Then, in five seconds, first one splendidly
developed organ degenerated, atrophied, and passed out of living
history, then another, until within thirty seconds the descent was
accomplished, and the countless millions of years of the slow, upward
climb were undone. The whole cycle of evolution had swept round its
circle, and the last generation, the end product of it all, was a
degraded thing fit only to fasten as an inert parasite on the first
creatures that had risen. Wilkes added a footnote.
"About one-third of the pictures from which that film was made are
photographs, the rest are sketches by myself, Professor Hayashi of
Tokyo, and a third man who wishes to remain anonymous. Please run it
through fast now."
"One-third fake, two-thirds humbug," the skeptics whispered.
The fast motion pictures were even more impressive. A whole race of
animals seemed suddenly to open out like a rose in the sunshine, bloom
gloriously in perfection for a few seconds and fade in a flash. The
struggle of millions upon millions of years justified itself in those
few seconds of beauty; the complete and final futility of the end
mocked the struggle and made its justification a bitter nothing.
"Lights, please," Wilkes requested. "Thank you." He bowed, left the
platform and resumed his seat.
"Is there any discussion?" the chairman asked.
A dozen men were on their feet, but De Soto was first.
"Mr. De Soto," the chairman nodded. The others sat down on the edges
of their seats.
"Mr. Chairman," De Soto began, "I must apologize for speaking in a
biological meeting. But I should like to ask Professor Wilkes whether
he has prepared a similar motion picture of the evolution of man."
"No," Wilkes replied, rising. "The data are not available."
"Do you think they could be obtained?"
"It is not impossible," Wilkes admitted quietly.
This was the last straw to the outraged experts.
"Professor Barnes," he announced when the commotion subsided.
Barnes was an unimaginative, middle-aged man who had made a very
considerable reputation by contradicting his superiors on details of no
importance and proving them in error on things which they had never
said. If any disagreeable job was to be done, Barnes was the man to do
it.
"I fail to see," Barnes began in an injured tone, "why a meeting of the
Biological Society should be turned into a vaudeville for the
entertainment of amateurs. No competent biologist would give Professor
Wilkes' fantastic reconstruction of what he imagines to be the past and
future history of the evolution of the protozoa a moment's
consideration. I move that Professor Wilkes be requested to withdraw
his paper."
"Second the motion!" came from a dozen scattered points, like the
cracking of snipers from an ambush.
"It has been moved and seconded that Professor Wilkes be requested to
withdraw his paper. Is there any discussion? Professor Wilkes?"
"I have nothing more to say at present."
"Any further discussion?"
"Before we vote," the chief skeptic, Barnes, volunteered, "I should
like to know what Professor Wilkes meant by his last remark. It
sounded to me like a threat."
"Professor Wilkes?"
"Mr. Chairman, it is only fair to answer the gentleman's question. The
society holds its next meeting three months hence in San Francisco.
Six months from now we meet here again. At that time, if the gentleman
still wishes further evidence, I will present him with an argument that
would silence Balaam's ass."
All but two of the audience laughed. Brown noted that one of the
exceptions was De Soto. The motion was carried.
"Professor Wilkes is requested to withdraw his paper," the chairman
announced. "Professor Wilkes."
Wilkes rose up, lean, angular, self-possessed and obstinate.
"I'll be damned if I do," he said simply and sat down.
In the ensuing debate it developed that parliamentary law had no
statute adequate to deal with Wilkes' offense and his unrepentant
contumacy. To the chagrin of the conservatives, the paper had to stand
as delivered.
Brown nodded to De Soto and they left the meeting together.
"A great paper," De Soto remarked as they stepped into the doctor's
car. "Where did Wilkes get his material?"
"Do you really want to know?" Brown asked seriously.
"I may as well," De Soto replied.
"Wilkes and I got most of it from the water in which you bathed that
evening you came to my house."
To the doctor's surprise, De Soto showed no astonishment.
"I suspected It," he admitted finally. "Do you and Crane know what you
are doing?"
"Not exactly. Nor," he added after a pause, "do you know what you are
doing. Otherwise how do you explain your obvious ignorance when you
came to consult me? You did not know the cause of the itching of your
skin."
"I admit it. But you forget that nature is like an open book to
me--when I am feeling well. Something is happening to my brain," he
continued after a long pause. "Thinking tires me. I never used to
think, but saw the inevitable consequences of any pattern of
circumstances--no matter how complicated--immediately, like a
photograph of the future. The tingling of my skin did not puzzle me.
I knew the cause."
"Then why did you consult me? You were badly upset."
"I was and I still am. Through a stupid blunder I exposed myself to
rays of an unknown hardness. If only two million volts or less, say,
than five million, were being fed into my tube when I forgot to open
the switches, I should not worry. In that case only the lowest forms
of life would be affected."
"The protozoa on your skin?"
"Exactly. Have you any idea where those initial forms originate?"
"That is the one thing that puzzles me," Brown admitted. "The average
human skin is alive with bacteria and other low forms of life, but not
with the sort of thing we have just seen."
"Not even with lower forms that might evolve into the types in Wilkes'
picture?"
"No. I am certain of it. The whole trend is different. Do you know
what I suspect?"
"I can guess. You think that you and Crane have stumbled upon the
secret of creating life. You haven't."
"Then what have we done? Where do those types originate?"
"In star dust. They are not those that have survived in the course of
terrestrial evolution. But let that pass. What can theories do for
me, with Alice on my hands?"
"You suspect something?"
"I do. And so do you. You have guessed by now, of course, that I know
who Crane's confederate was in my laboratory that night?"
"Who?" he asked in a level voice.
"You, of course. Couldn't you guess that human motives and commonplace
human deceit would be childish games to a man who reads all nature as
you read your newspaper? Or rather," he added in a low voice, "a man
who once had that capacity."
"You are losing it?" Brown demanded quietly. "I thought I had noticed
a dulling of your faculties. Why don't you rest? Your color is not
good."
"I can't. But let that go; it is of no importance. To go back to the
other for a moment. You men are all so trivial, so unambitious for
anything that will count a million years from now. Laugh if you like.
What good are the futile things you do for yourselves and your
children? Think of the race--the human race! As individuals we are
like those parasites on my body that Wilkes and you have taken all this
labor to elaborate. The race is on my body; men, the protozoa swarming
over it and breeding aimlessly. If we cannot preserve and mature the
whole race and make one intelligent, purposeful being out of it, we are
no better than an irritating itch on the skin of eternity. I could
have done so much for it--once. They asked me for trash that would
delight an idiot child for half a minute. They still ask it and I
shall give it to them--till I get tired."
"Let me repeat," Brown persisted, "that you are ill and must rest."
"Don't I know it? Then why can't I rest? Just because I am unwell.
When I first thought of marrying her, Alice was no more to me than you
are or even Crane. She was just another human being. Some day I may
tell you why I married her. Then a stupid accident began my
degeneration. In another six months I shall be as foolishly humane as
you are--curing the sick and helping the defective who should be
mercifully exterminated or at least sterilized. I have grown to love
my wife, even as you might yours, if you were married. That is why I
have let you believe that you and Crane had deceived me. When you know
everything, you will see that I am degenerated and done. Four months
ago I could have solved my own problem. Now I can't. I have to rely
on you."
"In what way?"
"Need she go through with what is before her?"
"I am afraid she must, even if I could throw my professional ethics
overboard--which I can't. She is too far along. Why can't you speak
out? Has the worst happened?"
"I don't know. I have degenerated, I tell you!"
"Well," the doctor muttered, "here we are. It can't be undone now.
I'll go up and see her. She eats well and sleeps normally?"
"Yes, but she is afraid. Even I can see that she is not natural."
"It is only your morbid fancy, man. Cheer up. She will come out of
this with flying colors."
The doctor found Alice happy and cheerful.
"Tell Miguel I'm all right now," she begged. "I can't bear being
marooned here all night while he is off working at the laboratory."
"But I thought he was taking a layoff, Alice?"
"Oh, I know he is supposed to be having a vacation. But he spends
practically the whole night at the laboratory and often most of the
morning. Then, when he comes home all tired out in the afternoon, he
is so cross I hardly dare speak to him." She smiled ruefully. "He
seems to prefer the company of his pets to mine."
"You just imagine it. Don't you know that a woman in your condition
always sees thousands of things that aren't so? Why, I was just
talking with Miguel about you when we drove up. He's positively silly
about you."
"Do you think he would let me watch him working in the laboratory again
as he used to do?" she asked, brightening.
"Why not ask him?" the doctor suggested.
"Oh, he always puts me off. I sometimes wonder whether there isn't
another--" She stopped, embarrassed.
"Woman?" Brown finished for her, laughing. "My dear Alice, you are
like all the rest at this time. Tell your husband what you fear, and
he won't let you out of his sight."
That evening at dinner De Soto, acting on a hint from Brown, went out
of his way to keep Alice amused and interested. She had a natural
taste for science and was fairly well informed on all that went on at
the Foundation. Biology, however, was an unexplored romance to her, as
it is to most young women who should know it--if they should know any
science.
Her husband sought to enlighten her. He began with an amusing account
of Wilkes' paper and its reception by the hopeless conservatives.
Thence he launched out on a flaming prophecy of what mankind might do,
were it so minded, with its own destiny.
"But," Alice objected, "fate or destiny is something that cannot be
altered."
"In the past, yes. We have blindly let nature lead us. A century from
now, if we wished, we might be leading nature."
"Is that what you are working on?"
"I was," he admitted in a strange voice. He rubbed the back of his
hand across his eyes. "But I am forgetting how."
"Perhaps if I were to be your mascot again your luck would return," she
suggested gaily. "Can't I come and watch you tonight?"
"Come along," he said cordially. "On one condition, however. You must
take a nap whenever you feel sleepy. I shall probably be working all
night. There is a comfortable cot in the closet there. I'll drag it
out when you begin to nod."
She was absurdly happy. "Miguel," she confessed, "do you know what I
was imagining in my morbid condition? Other men run about with women,
and I feared you might get that way, too."
He laughed boisterously. "Women? I haven't thought of another woman
since--" The puzzled frown that was becoming habitual with him
suddenly darkened his laughing face. "Since when?" he muttered,
scarcely aware of her presence. "I seem to remember a dirty suitcase
full of letters. From girls. Where was it?"
"Buenos Aires?" she suggested softly.
"How could it be? I was never in South America."
"Oh, Miguel! Can't you remember anything? Where did you study? You
knew all about physics when you first came to the Foundation. At least
that is what my father told me."
"Did he? Then he must be right. I have forgotten. Never mind now.
It really doesn't matter." He paused irresolutely before putting the
question he vaguely feared to ask. "Did your father ever speak of
anyone by the name of Wilson?"
"Not that I remember. Why do you ask?"
"Just a fancy. I seem to recall a man of that name who had a great
deal to do with my education. Have you ever heard of amnesia--loss of
memory? Well, I often think that is what is the matter with me. Some
day my whole past life will come back. Honestly, Alice, it is all as
black to me as it is to you. That is why I work incessantly--so that I
shall never remember."
"You are afraid of what you have forgotten?" she asked quietly. She
spoke to him as one might to an ailing child.
"Desperately," he admitted. "Work is the only relief. Sometimes, do
you know," he continued gravely, "I am so disturbed that I am tempted
to try drink."
"Don't," she counseled. "That would only make it worse. Can't you
remember anything of your father and mother?"
"It is all so impossible," he replied with a short laugh. "Did you
ever hear how Leonardo da Vinci is said to have remembered, when he was
a grown man, the days when his mother nursed him? You have read that?
I go farther back in my memories. I remember the dark place where I
lived before I was born. There was an intolerable flash of light, a
terrible conflict in the darkness, and I found myself in a world that
seemed strangely familiar yet utterly new. My very life contradicted
itself; I had no right to live, and yet lived. Gradually the dark
place of my prenatal memory faded and I found myself a man. The same
thing is happening again. It is just like those slides that Wilkes
showed this morning and his great moving pictures. Those protozoa I
told you of slowly climbed to the very peak of their perfection, only
to shoot to ruin in what, comparatively, was a second. The flower of
my manhood has closed. Old age is upon me and beyond it the darkness
of oblivion."
"Oh, Miguel! Can't you see that you are still a young man? Isn't your
mind as fresh as it ever was--since you began your true life work?"
"My true life work? I have forgotten what it is. Only an aimless
conflict of cross purposes remains. No sooner is a project started
than I tire of it. There was one thing--or were there two?--that I
hoped to do for the whole race. Did I ever start them? If so, I have
forgotten. For all I know, both of them may now be working out for the
good or evil of us all."
"Can't you find some one thing that will interest you and make you
happy for its own sake?"
"There is one," he said slowly, fixing her with his sombre eyes. "And
it is at the root of all the others, if only I could remember why it
is."
"What is it?" she whispered. The look on his face made her feel old
and ill.
"Life and what it may become," he answered. "The creation of life and
the remaking of it to my will, in spite of chance and blundering
evolution. This was my dream." He absently reached for her
cigarettes, took one, put it between his lips, lit it and inhaled
deeply like an inveterate smoker. "I have not yet told you the worst
that rides me like a nightmare and makes me afraid to lie down at
night."
"What?" she asked, cold with fear.
"A black spider. This is the key to my lost memory."
She tried to hide the terrible shock his confession had given her.
"Miguel," she said, "I never knew you smoked."
"Am I smoking?" he exclaimed, staring at the cigarette as if it were a
deadly viper. "When did I light this?"
"A minute or two ago. Don't you remember?"
"No! I have never smoked." He wiped his mouth distastefully. "The
smell of tobacco nauseates me. That settles it. Time I was at work,
instead of sitting here talking nonsense."
"I'm coming," she insisted firmly. "You said I might."
"Did I? Well, come along. Brown was right," he laughed. "He told me
not to let you out of my sight, or you'll be getting foolish notions
into your head."
They reached the laboratory shortly after nine o'clock. It was quite
like old times. Work, after all, Alice thought with secret joy, was
the one solvent for her husband's moodiness.
"I'm working at the two million volt level tonight," he informed her,
"so I must be careful."
"But I thought you handled twenty million volts without worrying much,"
she objected with mild surprise.
"I do. The two million volt is the critical point. The slightest
slip, and I pass from the gamma rays to the cosmic--the softer, of
course. Once they start generating in the tube, they may go on
indefinitely and rip through the whole scale, beyond the very hardest
rays that come to us from interstellar space. Then there is likely to
be the devil to pay unless we are adequately protected. So I shall
make you wear a triple outfit of the screening material. It won't
interfere with your movements. The stuff is as light as a cobweb."
"Are you sure you won't be in danger?"
"Positive," he laughed. "I've been working at this for two days now."
Going to the closet, he clothed himself in three suits of insulation
and selected the same for Alice. Before taking the garments to her, he
glanced furtively toward the chair where she sat reading, noticed that
she was apparently absorbed in her book, and softly closed the door of
the closet. Then, from a shelf beneath the electric light, he picked
up a small flat dish the size of a silver dollar, and held it up to the
light. The dish was full of water. In the water a single transparent
globule, as big as a small pea, just floated.
"Here are your togs," he called, carefully closing the door of the
closet. "Come over here and I'll help you on with them."
At last she was dressed in her triple armor and went back to her
station. De Soto walked over to the black devil box and began making
the connections with the new tube. This was not a replica of the one
which Crane had smashed, but an improved design. It was indeed the
very model which he had exhibited the previous afternoon to the
desperate trustees as his answer--when fully developed--to the bid of
Williams and Company for the power markets of the world. This, he had
emphasized, was merely the key idea; the commercial development of it
would be a work of months for the whole staff. But it would be ready
when Williams shot his bolt. Experiments for the good of commerce and
the salvation of the trustees, however, were not De Soto's object for
the moment. His purpose was more abstract.
It started tamely enough. The easy connections were made almost
automatically, and De Soto threw in the first two hundred and fifty
thousand volts. Unlike Crane's unwieldy tube, De Soto's kicked up no
spectacular display. There was no fluorescence. Alice followed his
movements surreptitiously, saw that he was absorbed and happy in his
work, and dipped into her book.
"I must say your experiment isn't very exciting," she called across the
laboratory.
He had completely forgotten her presence. At the moment she spoke, his
back was toward her. Hearing a voice, he started violently. Then he
remembered, and laughed. His wife was there. But in wheeling round he
brushed against two of the screw switches with the sleeve of his
transparent armor. The tube was set to receive and withstand only two
million volts. Instantly, an unpredictable mishap, twenty million
surged against the cathode with an irresistible impact.
It was too late to rectify the error by "killing" the whole apparatus.
De Soto did this automatically when he realized what had happened, as
he did immediately. Alice saw his face freeze in horror, why, she
could not understand.
"Is anything wrong?" she cried.
"Stay there!" he shouted. "Don't touch your clothes!"
"Come away!" she cried, dreading she knew not what.
"I can't," he groaned, frozen where he stood. "I begin to remember.
Watch!"
In the lower half of the tube a blinding blue light suddenly flashed
up, flooding the laboratory with a lurid brilliance.
"It should be white!" he croaked. "This is wrong!"
The blue light contracted, as if compressed by an invisible piston, and
increased intolerably in intensity. Narrowing rapidly to a mere plane
of blue fire as the piston descended, it became extinct.
"Look out!" he shouted. "It is going to explode!"
The concussion never came. Staring at the sheer black of the vacuum,
De Soto saw the tiny vortices which he anticipated like a man in a
dream, spinning from the outside of the crystal window and expanding as
they spun.
"Come away!" Alice entreated, seizing his arm. "This must be
dangerous--oh! What is that?"
His eyes followed hers to the door of the closet. Something was moving
about angrily in the darkness and blundering against the loosely
fastened door in its efforts to escape.
"What is it?" she choked, clutching his arm in terror.
"I can't remember. There was a spider in a box--"
He never finished the sentence. The flimsy catch suddenly gave way,
and the incredible monster lurched into the laboratory. Believing she
had gone mad, Alice fled shrieking for the exit. De Soto froze where
he stood, fascinated by the enormous creature hopping toward him. It
was a toad, the size of a full grown man, hideously deformed, without
eyes, its gelatinous skin pitted and pocked with holes the size of a
human fist from which dripped and trickled a constant shower of young.
As they rolled helplessly over the concrete floor the lumps of spawn
began to develop, to thrust out feeble legs, and to increase in bulk
like the arithmetic of a nightmare.
Before he realized what he held in his hands, De Soto found himself
playing the withering flame of the oxy-acetylene torch over the hissing
mass and its multiplying offspring.
Sick with loathing when his task ended, he rushed from the laboratory
to overtake his wife. She had collapsed outside the door.
"I must make her believe it never happened," he groaned, lifting her in
his arms. "Taxi," he shouted, hailing a passing driver. "My wife is
unwell. Hurry!" He gave the address and tumbled in with her. "I am a
fool," he muttered. "Like all of them I can only blunder."
On reaching home he put her to bed and telephoned for Brown.
"She had a fright in the laboratory," he explained. "Tell her it was
nothing."
"Was it nothing?"
"Yes, if she is to keep her mind."
Alice lay critically ill for two weeks. During her waking moments she
was barely rational. Whether she believed the assurance of De Soto and
the doctor that she had imagined the horror, neither ever learned.
When at last she recovered, pale and shaky, she never referred to the
incidents of that terrible evening. They thought she had forgotten.
Chapter Twelve--_HIS SON_
One morning six months later, a puzzled oculist sat staring into the
right eye of a tired-looking young man of sallow complexion.
"It is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw," the oculist exclaimed.
"You say your vision is still perfect?"
"As good as it ever was," the oldish-looking young man responded
wearily.
"When did you first notice this?"
"About five months ago, one morning while I was shaving. I saw a small
blue speck on the top rim of the iris--at the base of the blue wedge
now. At first I thought it might be the beginning of a cataract. As I
never read now, I didn't worry much."
"It is not a cataract," the oculist asserted. "There is simply a thin
blue wedge in the general black of the iris. Your eyes are changing
color, that's all. Nothing to be alarmed about. Would you mind my
reporting the case to the Medical Society? Of course I shall not give
your name, Mr. De Soto."
"Not at all. So there is nothing to worry about?"
"Nothing that I can see. You are just reversing the usual order.
Babies born with blue eyes often turn brown-eyed or black-eyed after a
few months. I hope you're not going back to the nursing bottle," he
concluded with a laugh.
"No fear," De Soto responded gloomily. "But I should like a good jolt
of whiskey."
"Perhaps I can oblige you," the oculist smiled. "I keep this for my
patients when they must hear bad news." He poured a stiff drink for De
Soto and half a dozen drops for himself. "Here's luck."
"Luck," De Soto responded, and tossed the drink down his throat. "That
was what I needed."
Outside in the cool morning sunshine, he had a sudden revulsion of
distaste. "What ever made me drink that rotten stuff? It tasted like
varnish. Ugh! Never again."
He hailed a cab and drove to the Foundation. There was to be a full
meeting of the Board of Trustees to discuss the offensive of the
Erickson against the Universal Power Transmission Company.
Disregarding Crane's hundred thousand dollar tip, Williams had gone
ahead at top speed for the past six months developing "his" invention
on a world-wide commercial basis. For the past month he and his
associates had been deluging America, Europe, Africa and Asia with
their propaganda, broadcasting the glad tidings that the wireless
transmission of electrical energy--high power or low power--was no
longer a dream of the theoretical engineers, but an accomplished fact
that would shortly be on the market. This, as they justly claimed, was
an industrial advance comparable in importance with the invention of
the steam engine.
Through all this furious publicity the Erickson crowd remained
strangely silent.
The president opened the meeting with a glowing tribute to the genius
of their Director, who, he declared, had given them the world to play
with. They must not, he concluded in tones of lofty solemnity, abuse
the great privilege which their own business enterprise and the great
skill of their Director had given them. Far from it. Greed and
unscrupulous monopoly might actuate their competitors--witness the
ruthless manner in which the Universal was crowding less lucky
corporations into the ditch--but such base motives never had been those
of the Erickson and never would be. A world monopoly not only of power
transmission but of the means of generating power would put the
Erickson beyond competition. Be theirs the mission to bring industry
and the public--the ultimate consumer--into closer harmony and a deeper
appreciation of the inestimable benefits which a wise business
foresight confers upon groping humanity. All this for a reasonable and
legitimate profit of a thousand per cent on their investment. Would
Mr. De Soto care to make a few remarks?
Mr. De Soto would. He swayed slightly as he rose to reply--for him it
was a reply, and not a mere footnote.
"Gentlemen," he began, "you must pardon me for being just a little
drunk."
"Mr. De Soto!" the president soothed in an audible undertone. "We know
you are joking."
"I am not joking. I'm drunk. Fifteen minutes ago I had a damned good
stiff jolt of real whiskey. Otherwise I shouldn't be talking now. I
had intended saying it sometime later."
They stared at him in astonishment. Was this their usually polite--if
sometimes brusque--severely scientific and eminently practical
Director? The man who had given them the world to play with? Surely
not. And et--_could_ he be telling the truth? But then, he never
drank.
"It gives me a warm, human glow, gentlemen," he said with emphasis.
"Do you know what that means? You don't. Right now you are thinking
of ways to quarter Universal after it is dead. You don't like its
presumption in daring to invade your territory. Will you stop when you
have broken them? You will not. As long as one of its backers, its
bondholders, or its stockholders has a dollar in his pocket, you are
going after it till you get it. Pardon me, gentlemen, if I cannot
restrain my feelings."
He turned aside and spat out of the window.
"You make me sick. Sicker than that rotten whiskey made me. All my
life I have been looking for a human being, and I haven't found one."
His tone changed. "For humanity's sake," he said in a low voice, "I
implore you to drop this before it is too late."
A trustee rose. De Soto's words had impressed him.
"Are we to understand that your answer to Universal is not what you
thought it was?"
De Soto burst into a roar of laughter.
"Incorrigible," he shouted. "Absolutely incorrigible. Take what is
coming to you."
The president took up the parable. Numerous disquieting hints released
by Crane came home to roost. In particular he recalled Crane's
disquieting theory that De Soto might ruin both the Universal and the
Erickson.
"You feel confident that our demonstration will convince the experts?"
This time De Soto did not even smile.
"It would convince anyone," he said. "Send out your invitation for
four weeks from today--cable, telegraph, write. That will give the
Europeans ample time to get here. Don't forget to include liberal
travelling expenses and expert fees. You will get it all back. But,
for the last time, I ask you to call off the whole thing. There is one
humane thing to do now, and only one. Lay your whole project before
the Universal. They will see that they are hopelessly beaten. Then
agree to withdraw your scheme, scrap the invention, and forget it
completely, if they will do the same with theirs. They can lose no
more that way than if they stick to the last. If they ever attempt to
market their device or to transmit power themselves you can stop them
instantly by threatening to compete."
"But what is the point?" a trustee objected.
"I can't tell you."
"Why didn't you warn us--as you seem to be doing now--six months ago?"
"Because then I had not gone soft. My plans were different, although
even then I was beginning to doubt and to weaken."
"Weaken on what, Mr. De Soto?" the president demanded curiously.
"My purpose when I first sought employment at this Foundation."
"And what was that?"
"I will not tell you."
"Why not, Mr. De Soto? It cannot have been dishonorable, surely?"
"Dishonorable?" De Soto laughed. "What is honor to a fool? I do not
choose to tell you because I have changed my mind. Or rather," he
added, "my mind has changed me."
"If, as Mr. De Soto assures us, we can't lose out, I don't see why we
should discuss the matter further. I move that the Director be
instructed to carry out his program, four weeks from today, as already
arranged," a trustee said.
"Second the motion."
"Moved and seconded--."
The vote was carried unanimously.
"This is your final action?" De Soto asked quietly. The president
nodded. "Then I shall make my last appeal. You will smash Universal,
as I have promised. But in doing so you will not benefit your
customers. Have you their interests in mind, or your own? I can
convince Universal that it also will not make its customers any
happier. If you abandon this now, I will make them give up theirs
tomorrow. Which is it to be?"
There was a dead silence.
"Very well," De Soto continued. "That is your answer. I understand.
Please accept my resignation, to take effect immediately."
"Don't act in haste," the president begged as De Soto walked from the
room. "We shan't accept your resignation until you have had four weeks
to think things over.
"Four weeks?" he echoed with a bitter smile, his hand on the door knob.
"Why keep me? The full instruction for capturing the world markets in
everything, not only power, which is at the bottom of it all--are
already in your hands. Your Board has the detailed plan before you,
and your very competent engineers can execute it. Put it into action
four weeks from today. You will not need me. I shall move out of the
Foundation residence tomorrow."
"Mr. De Solo!" the president protested in a shocked voice. "The
residence is yours indefinitely, whether you stay with us or not.
Surely you do not think us--"
"I think nothing whatever about you," De Soto retorted, opening the
door, "except that you are hanging yourself, your sons and your
daughters, and saving me the trouble. I would tell you to go to hell,
if I did not know that the next thirty years on this earth are going to
beat any hell ever imagined by the worst diseased imagination of the
middle ages--Dante's." Closing the door behind him, he left the
outraged trustees to their thoughts.
"Drunk?" one hazarded.
"Or crazy. It will be a good thing if he does resign. We don't need
him any longer, with this in our hands. I vote we make no advances to
him to reconsider. What can he do for us? Nothing."
And that seemed to be the general opinion. The meeting dissolved
without formal action on the resignation of the Director.
On reaching home, De Soto at once told his wife of his resignation.
Alice was pale and ill. She listlessly acquiesced.
"You know best," she said.
"I plan to move out of this house tomorrow. It would be impossible to
continue living here practically on the Foundation's charity. Let us
move out to the country--I'll find a nice place."
"Can't we wait till--?" She did not complete the sentence.
"Certainly. We can stay here at least four weeks, if you really wish
it. What does Brown say?"
"He hasn't called today. Doubtless he is busy."
"Yes, I remember. The Biological Society is meeting today and he is on
the committee. Don't you worry. Everything will come out in fine
shape. We can stay here indefinitely if you like--it was your home for
years. Perhaps we had better."
"But your resignation?"
"Oh, that. I can do what I please with the trustees. If the worst
comes to the worst, I'll buy the place. We're almost indecently rich,
you know," he laughed, trying to cheer her.
All her sparkle was dead. "I wish it were over," she sighed.
"There, there! You'll soon be as happy as a queen."
"Tell me, Miguel," she said slowly, "has my mind been right since that
evening in the laboratory? Sometimes I seem to be living in a horrible
dream. I fainted, didn't I? Do I seem rational to you?"
"Why shouldn't you?" he asked with assumed astonishment. "You are.
These fancies are natural to you at this time. They mean nothing. Ask
Brown when he comes, if you think I'm just talking to disguise the
truth. What I tell you is cold, scientific fact, and he will back me
up."
"I wish he would come."
"If that's all you're worrying about, it's soon cured. He will be here
in fifteen minutes if he's still alive."
He left her to telephone to Brown's office. The doctor was at the
Biological Society and promised to come at once.
"She's imagining things," De Soto informed him in the hall. "Cheer her
up."
"I'll do my best. They often get like that at this stage. It means
nothing."
Thirty minutes elapsed before Brown rejoined the anxious husband.
"Well?" De Soto inquired.
"She is normal, except in one thing. Her mind seems to be straying."
"In what respect?" De Soto paled.
"Sit down. I want to tell you something that I have never had the
courage to confide to another living man--except Crane. He and I saw
it together. If Alice is losing her mind, her delusions have a
peculiar quality of truth. At least that is how I feel. Perhaps you
will agree, when you have heard what I have to say. Ready?"
"I'm ready. You have seen the effect of the hardest rays on living
tissue?"
"Yes. Crane and I together." In five minutes the doctor gave De Soto
a sufficient account of what he and Crane had witnessed in the twenty
million volt laboratory.
"You admit that it is not unreasonable or absurd?" Brown asked.
"You wouldn't after seeing Wilkes' demonstration on the protozoa! A
different set of cells were effected in your spiders; that's the only
distinction. The hardness of the rays--or, if you prefer, the
shortness of the waves in the radiation emitted, determines what cells
will be stimulated or destroyed. You have guessed that much?"
"More, as you may see tonight, if you care to come to the public
lecture. Wilkes is to talk again."
"And silence Balaam's ass?" De Soto suggested with a sardonic smile.
"It can't be done. I tried this morning to answer several, and left
them still braying. Still, if Alice is well enough and won't miss me,
I'll be there to see the fun. She suspects that what came out of the
closet was real, and not the creation of a sudden nervous breakdown?"
"Suspects? Alice knows that it was real. And what is darkening her
mind is your silence. Why did you do it?"
"A pure blunder. I'm always blundering. Alice spoke and startled me.
My sleeve did the rest. What happened was as much of a discovery to me
as it was to her. Since that evening I have studied the effect
exhaustively. If you care to inspect my menagerie, you will see that
the last cage is empty. I'm done--beaten. I'll never use the
chloroform bottle or the oxy-acetylene torch again. Nature has got the
better of me at last."
"But what on earth did you think you were trying to do when you
blundered?"
"As you refused to help me," De Soto replied grimly, "I tried to help
myself. If I could control evolution in one direction, why not in the
opposite? Then I could undo what you as well as I, believe may have
happened."
"And you found you could not pass up or down the scale at will?"
"No longer. Ten months ago I could have played on it like a flute--and
I did. Now I have lost my capacity. Can't you see that I am
degenerating? Look at my right eye. Is that blue wedge a normal
change in a healthy man?"
Brown peered into the affected eye.
"When did this begin?"
"Nearly five months ago--more or less. Can you explain it? No?
Neither can I. Nor can I account for my washed-out feeling. Do you
notice my color? And the deadness of my hair?"
"All that is merely lack of tone due to overwork and worry. As soon as
Alice is safely through you will be as good as ever."
"Better," he said bitterly. "That night when she saw the thing, I told
her that I was going back to the dark place where I was born. Your
account of what you did with those spiders is like a hand pushing me
into the darkness. Something will rush out of it presently and destroy
me. But before it does, I shall see the light I have been groping
after for months." He brooded in gloomy thought for some moments
without speaking. "Promise me," he said, looking straight into the
doctor's eyes with a flash of his old dominance, "that you will take
care of Alice whatever happens to me."
"Look here, De Soto," the doctor retorted quietly, "you mustn't think
of anything like that. In spite of all that she half suspects, you are
still her one reason for living."
"But if I die--naturally?"
"You won't, for years yet. However, I'll face it. If anything happens
to you, I will see that your wife gets a square deal. Now let us talk
of something more cheerful. Coming with me tonight to hear Wilkes'
paper?"
De Soto brightened. "I'll be there," he laughed. "But wait till you
hear the full orchestra."
"When?" Brown demanded.
"Thirty years from now. It will begin four weeks from today."
The auditorium for the evening lecture was crowded. De Soto found a
seat in the rear. Brown presided, to introduce the speaker. News had
leaked out through the committee that the address of the evening, "New
Light on Evolution" was likely to prove exciting. The newspapers had
spared neither conjecture nor innuendo to advertise the meeting.
At eight fifteen exactly, Brown briefly introduced the speaker. This
time Wilkes had a manuscript in his hand. He began by dryly reviewing
the theory of evolution. Sensation hunters yawned and shuffled their
feet. Wilkes paid not the slightest attention, but continued to bore
through his dry-as-dust argument like a beetle in a board. At
last--after forty minutes--he had finished his preliminaries.
"All that, ladies and gentlemen, is old stuff. You learned it in the
grammar school--or if you didn't, you should have. Evolution is less a
theory than a description. Does it assign any physical cause for the
origin of species? It does not. The facts which it is alleged to
coordinate are almost as complicated as the theory which strings them
together. Compared to any of the greater mathematical or physical
theories, it is rather a childish effort. It does not go to the root
of the matter."
The papers reported the next morning that there was considerable
disorder at this point of the professor's address.
"Old stuff!" he shouted. "As old as Democritus and as dead as
Lucretius. Metaphysics, ladies and gentlemen, metaphysics! Until we
can control the course of evolution in our laboratories we are no
better than Aristotle with his cock and bull."
"Can you control it?" a ribald voice from the back of the hall demanded.
"Order!" Brown snapped. "There will be an opportunity to ask questions
after the lecture."
"Since the disorderly gentleman in the rear has asked a pertinent
question, I will make an exception, and answer him. No. I can not
control evolution."
"Then what do you think you are talking about?" an infinitely dismal,
sepulchral croak from the gallery inquired.
"Listen, and you will find out. Another interruption and I leave the
platform."
There was a dead silence.
"Facts first, fun later. Before you will be in a fit state of mind to
appreciate my clinching argument and enjoy the fun--such as it is--I
must get some hard dry facts into your heads. It may hurt those
unaccustomed to using their brains, but nobody will be seriously
injured.
"First, there is the cause, the physical reason for evolution. What is
it? I don't know, and neither do you. Like Newton, 'hypotheses non
fingo'--I don't indulge in wild guesses. But, like all scientists, I
guess as Newton did. Then I check up my guesses against the facts, or
against the experiments predicted by the guess.
"In this instance," the professor continued with evident relish,
ignoring the drowsy blonde at his right in the third row, "in this
instance the ascertained facts of paleontology are indisputable to all
but Fundamentalists. We human beings are mammals--the female suckles
her young, and our young are born alive. Reptiles are not mammals.
For one thing their young are born only half alive, as eggs. Nor are
birds mammals. Yet birds and mammals both sprang from the reptiles.
That is the incontrovertible record of paleontology.
"Any human being who cares to go back far enough will find his family
tree to be a mere twig on the greatest tree of life this earth has ever
known, that of the reptiles. In short, the reptiles were our
ancestors."
A prolonged hiss from the third row broke the thread of the professor's
discourse.
"Ah," he resumed, "I perceive that evolution has still a long way to go
for some of us. To continue what I was saying before the gentleman in
the third row obliged me with a practical demonstration. Suppose we
could control evolution, both backwards and forwards. Imagine first
that we can reverse the natural progress of man, and that we can do it
at a greatly accelerated pace. In half an hour we should see ourselves
chattering in the trees with our cousin apes; an hour would find both
us and our cousins on familiar terms with queer little mammals that
none of us would recognize as our great, great grandfathers; and
finally, after about two hours of this prodigiously fast sweep into the
'backward abysm of time,' you and I would behold a strange and pathetic
sight. We should see a bewildered colony of reptiles, their short
feeble arms clutched about their narrow bosoms, contemplating in horror
and awe their unnatural broods--the first mammals. Could these unhappy
parents look far enough into their misty future, they would see the
last of their kind being mercilessly exterminated by the lusty
descendants of these first, puny mammals.
"Before turning to a brighter picture, let us glance at another, more
flattering to our human conceit. Suppose a common hen, or any other
bird, could be sent back along the path which it had taken from the
beginning of time. It would reach the reptiles much faster than we.
Almost in a quarter of an hour--at the same relative speed as our own
trip to our family tree--the hen would perceive that its feathers had
given place to scales, and its toothless bill to a vicious, horny mouth
crammed with long, sharp teeth.
"Now for the brighter picture. Accelerate the rate of evolution
forward. What becomes of us? Ultimately, of course, we shall probably
become as extinct as the great reptiles from which all our kind
originally sprang. But, on the way to extinction there is one not
wholly unpleasant prospect. We shall subdue the physical forces of
nature almost completely, and the entire race of mankind will become
incomparably more intelligent than it now is, with a greatly heightened
joy in living. The discontented will have perished. That they may be
noble in their discontent does not concern us. They will have gone the
way of the dodo long before the race begins to live, for the simple
reason that discontent is a destroying influence. It is nature's
anaesthetic to drug the misfits into a readier acceptance of the death
which is their one answer to a world with which they are unfitted to
struggle. Many of them may be remembered for great work, for a little
time, but they themselves, and in the end their work also, will perish.
"That is at least a not improbable conjecture. A second possibility
that the future holds for us is equally obvious. Just as the mammals
sprang from the reptiles, so from the mammals in turn, man included,
may spring a totally new race of creatures. It is even possible, from
minute examination of the germ cells of our own bodies, to predict in
its broadest outlines what the race of our successors may look like. I
shall not bore you with these speculations now, as facts that can be
seen, heard and handled are more convincing to those who have eyes to
see, ears to hear, and fingers to touch.
"Six months ago, I showed before this Society a series of drawings and
photographs from life, in which it was proved that my associates and I
had succeeded in compressing the whole evolution--millions and millions
of years--of certain species of the lowest type of animal into a few
hours. Those protozoa, beginning with the humblest, passing to the
highest, and again sinking to the very lowest through innumerable
generations, all within the short span of less than twenty-four hours'
actual experiment, should have convinced those capable of human reason
that my claims are valid. Was anyone convinced? No. 'Though one rose
from the dead,' they would not believe. Hence I have prepared a more
convincing demonstration, this time in the opposite direction. Rather,
my friend has prepared such a proof; I am merely the showman. He has a
professional reputation to lose; I never had one worth considering."
"Ladies and gentlemen, I now present you with a proof that we have
succeeded in reversing evolution. What I am about to show you
illustrates our process as applied to birds. If we are able, as we
claim, to reverse evolution for the birds, we should be able to produce
the prehistoric reptiles from which the birds sprang.
"Our starting point was a common brown hen of the Buff Orpington
variety. Until she was subjected to the proper influences, she laid
excellent eggs, many of which were eaten and enjoyed by my
collaborators. They were normal hens' eggs. After our experiment she
began laying very small eggs. They were not shelled, but encased in a
porous membrane like tough skin. Eighteen of these abnormal eggs
hatched. I now show the reptile which hatched out of one of those
eighteen eggs. It was a few days over four months of age when it died.
Mr. Chairman, if you will have the alcohol tank wheeled onto the stage
we can proceed with the demonstrations."
As one the audience rose to its feet.
"Everyone will have an opportunity to see the reptile," Wilkes shouted.
"Please do not come up to the platform until the guards permit you to
file past."
An oblong box like a coffin, draped in gray tarpaulins, was now wheeled
onto the stage beside the speaker's stand.
With a pardonably dramatic gesture, the professor unveiled his
masterpiece by flapping off the tarpaulins.
"There!"
Submerged in the glass tank of alcohol a long, lemon-yellow
monstrosity, like a huge lizard with an over-developed head, lay supine
on its spiny back. The enormous head rested with its flat occiput on
the bottom of the tank, its long, gaping jaws almost projecting above
the level of the alcohol. From tail tip to head the reptile measured
between eight and nine feet; its evil jaws could have crushed a young
pig at one snap. The teeth, in double rows on both upper and lower
jaws, might easily have crunched to fragments the bones of a large dog.
The hind legs, like a crocodile's, were muscular and well developed;
the front, mere fins with claws, were clasped pathetically over the
narrow chest in the eternal resignation of death. The skin could
hardly be called scaly. Rather it was a compact weave of triangular
warts, each about the size of half a postage stamp.
Seeing is said to be believing. Those who assert that it is do not
know either the scientific mind or the fundamentalist. The pickled
reptile was received first with the silence of incredulity. Then, in
ludicrous unison, a rhythmic chant of "Fake! Fake! Fake!" shook the
auditorium. The crowd filed up to the platform, hustled by the guards,
passed before the glass tank, saw with their own eyes the yellow
monstrosity in the alcohol and doubted.
At a gesture from the chairman, the crowd at last resumed their seats.
Brown made a brief address.
"In conclusion, I may say," he remarked, "that Professor Wilkes is not
surprised by your reception of his evidence. May I ask for a show of
hands? Those who consider this thing in the tank as substantiating, in
some slight degree, Professor Wilkes' contention that evolution may be
reversed by man, will please raise the right hand."
Several hands--at least a dozen--shot up. Before the meagre count
could be taken, an indignant voice claimed the privilege of the floor.
"Mr. Chairman!"
"Mr. Barnes?"
"I must protest against a meeting of the Biological Society being
turned into a revivalist experience orgy. Professor Wilkes has tried
to foist upon the lay public a gross imposture. His so-called reptile
is dead. I deny that any such reptile ever lived. The majority of
those professional biologists now present--whose spokesman I have the
honor to be--pronounce the yellow thing in that tank to be an extremely
able fraud."
When the applause, foot-stamping and shouting, which greeted this
fearless indictment of the exhibit in question as a bold fraud, had
subsided, a resonant voice was heard claiming the chair's attention.
"Mr. De Soto?" Brown invited.
"May I ask how Professor Wilkes induced the change in the germ cells of
his hen to obtain this result?"
"As Professor Wilkes' paper has been received unfavorably," Brown
replied, after a consultation in an undertone with the professor, "he
prefers not to state for the present."
"In that case, Mr. Chairman," De Soto replied, "may I have the floor
for five minutes?"
Brown's decision was drowned in an uproar. "De Soto! De Soto!" the
crowd chanted. Brown at last got order.
"Mr. De Soto will take the platform in a few minutes, if he will be so
kind. In the meantime, Professor Wilkes wishes to add a few remarks.
May I ask you to keep your seats while he is speaking? Professor
Wilkes."
The professor began in his driest voice.
"Any good scientist enjoys being called a liar by his brother
scientists. It puts him on his mettle. I have to thank Professor
Barnes for having performed that service for me. You will recall that
I said eighteen of the reptile eggs produced by that brown hen hatched.
One of the reptiles died a few days over four months of age.
"'Eyes have they and see not; ears, and hear not.' Of such are
Professor Barnes and all his followers, the fundamentalists of biology.
They call my poor dead friend a fake. I wish they were right, for then
I might, as an artist, rival nature herself."
"You haven't answered him," a hollow voice from the second row
suggested.
"You are right," Wilkes admitted. "I cannot answer him. His kind is
unanswerable. For the rest, however, I have a little surprise, as a
reward for their patient faith. Remember, eighteen eggs were hatched.
One of the reptiles died; you see him here. What of the remaining
seventeen?"
"Yes!" Barnes shouted, leaping to his feet. "What of them?"
"Kindly address your remarks to the Chair," Brown suggested acidly.
"Professor Wilkes, what of the remaining seventeen?"
"They are alive and well," Wilkes replied simply.
"Show them to us!"--This from the audience at large.
"Unfortunately I cannot do so," Wilkes admitted regretfully.
Shouts of "Fake!" all but drowned the disappointed "Why?" Ignoring the
former, Wilkes satisfied the latter.
"Because this stage would not hold all seventeen of them, or even six.
They are not pleasant to handle outside of a steel cage. So I have
brought only one, which my friend, Doctor Crane, will now show you.
Doctor Crane."
The gorgeous purple velvet curtains parted at the back of the stage,
revealing Crane in the act of bossing eight brawny workmen who tugged
and hauled at an enormous cage of steel bars mounted on two low trucks.
The cage was wheeled into the center of the stage; Crane withdrew with
his workmen; the purple curtains closed; Wilkes followed Brown from the
platform, and the guards braced themselves for the onset.
At first there was silence. Then fear. Then astonishment. Then a
foolish, fluttering applause that died instantly. Again silence, tense
and heavy with fear. The sluggish reptile in the cage raised its
enormous head, stared for an uncomprehending five seconds at the pink
and gray sea before it, regurgitated, and unconcernedly turned away.
As the horny lips snarled back, the breathless spectators saw two
double rows of cruel teeth, sharper than a shark's and as long as a
sabre-toothed tiger's, bared for the attack.
"About six and a half months old," Wilkes remarked dryly. "Has
Professor Barnes any comments?" The deathly silence remained unbroken.
"If not," Wilkes continued, "you will presently notice a characteristic
odor. Those of you who have ever smelt a large living snake, say a boa
constrictor, will recognize the odor in a general way. This, you will
admit, is similar, but much more intense, with qualities of its own.
You are smelling, ladies and gentlemen, the same smell that paralyzed
our mammalian ancestors with fright when they tried to hide from their
reptilian parents in the reeds. Familiar, isn't it?"
There was no reply. The indifferent brute with a brain no bigger,
perhaps, than a baby sparrow's, raised its head and preened its scales.
Along its spiny backbone, and over its massive flanks, a rime of
triangular flecks of bright green passed lightly, like the sudden
rubbing of an armor of artichokes the wrong way by an invisible hand.
The crowd shuddered. They had seen birds do that. With a sudden
movement of its sinewy neck that was almost graceful, the squatting
brute ruffled the upstanding scales under its armpits, rapidly combed
its backbone with its chattering teeth, shook its whole body
luxuriously, and settled down to indolent ease. A cold, foul odor
wafted over the audience.
"I refer you," Wilkes remarked from his station by the stage steps, "to
any competent, treatise on paleontology for the origin of this reptile.
It is well known. At least we think it is. When full grown, it will
be as tall as a giraffe and as bulky as an elephant. This is one of
the later species of reptile. The great ones had already begun to fade
from the screen of evolution when this one thrived. Notice the
degeneration of the thorax. It has an obviously inadequate lung
capacity. The hind legs also show weakness. On the flanks--not where
one would naturally expect to find such things--you will see two
serrated excrescences. These are the rudimentary wings trying to break
through the tough armor of scales. The wings, of course, did not
originate in this way. What you see is merely one of nature's
innumerable hit and miss, blunder and succeed methods of evolving a new
species. The wings that finally came in were of deeper origin--in the
mutated chromosomes of our friend here. Her--this reptile is a
female--her germ cells contained the irresistible mutation that finally
gave us the birds, including the brown hen from which this terrific
beast was born.
"I call her terrific," he continued, "because I personally am very much
afraid of her. You observe that she is just like her dead brother in
the glass tank here, except that she is five times his size in linear
dimensions, and therefore one hundred and twenty-five times his bulk.
Before I state why I am afraid of her, let me assure everyone in this
audience that neither I nor any of my associates has ever fed her a
living animal. The pigs and calves which so far have kept her alive
were duly slaughtered and butchered before being introduced into the
cage. A pet cat belonging to one of my collaborators chanced to stray
within reach of the cage one day when this reptile was much smaller and
could get her head through between the bars. The cat was nipped. It
died in four seconds. Now, for all that paleontology can tell us, we
do not know whether or not this prehistoric reptile was venomous. From
what happened to the cat, I suspect that it was."
As if to underline the professor's remarks, the huge mass in the cage
suddenly became a spitting fury. Hurling herself against the bars of
the cage, she slavered and screamed at the audience in an access of
reptilian fury.
"Take her out!" Brown shouted from the floor. Crane rallied his crew.
Three minutes later the hissing screams were suddenly cut off by the
closing of steel doors behind the purple curtains. Brown remounted the
platform.
"Mr. De Soto wishes to say something," he announced.
The crowd sat down in dead silence, and De Soto walked to the front of
the hall.
"I state facts," he began, by way of introduction. "Several months ago
I began to experiment on living tissue with high-frequency,
short-wavelength X-rays. The results were encouraging. I used what
knowledge I had gained from these preliminary experiments to predict
what must happen under the influence of cosmic rays--the rays of
shortest wavelength known to science. These rays will penetrate forty
feet of solid lead. With this penetration they should be capable of
affecting the smallest cells in all animals--insects, mammals,
protozoa, man. By properly modulating the wavelengths of the rays
sprayed upon the chromosomes, I found it possible to accelerate normal
evolution or to retard it; to produce mutations--the creation of new
species, such as mammals from reptiles--or to inhibit them. Perhaps
here I overstate; my completed experiments do not fully justify my last
assertion. I undertook, many months ago, to put my theories to a
crucial test. Unfortunately certain accidents, due entirely to my own
carelessness, make the outcome doubtful. I can only await the decisive
answer which, I anticipate, will be given within the month. You agree,
Doctor Brown?"
"I think so," Brown assented in a voice that was scarcely audible. De
Soto nodded and went on.
"It is possible, I assert, to control evolution in both the forward
direction and the backward. Professor Wilkes' two exhibits--that of
six months ago with the protozoa, and that of tonight with the
hen-reptile--put this beyond dispute.
"All this, ladies and gentlemen, is purely academic. It is of interest
only to professional biologists. Of what application can it possibly
be to you?
"Let me tell you. If we can control evolution; if we can hasten nature
forward at the rate of a million years in one of our human years; if we
can perfect our race as Professor Wilkes has predicted, who will
profit? Who? Is it worth perfecting? I confess that I do not know.
"Suppose you were given the chance to perfect yourselves. Would you
take it? I think not; for no one of us knows what perfection is.
"Suppose again that you were offered the opportunity of settling all of
your problems, once and for all, within one generation--thirty years.
Would you take it? No. Why? Because you are human and blunderers, of
which I am one.
"Suppose, lastly, that the decision was made for you. Would you be
happy? I doubt it. Stupidity, or human kindness, if you like, is the
one thing that distinguishes us from that brainless reptile which Dr.
Crane just showed us. For to be stupid is to be kind, and to be kind
is to be stupid. Do not think I am bandying epigrams. I am not.
Reflect. Is it not true--humanly true--that every time any one of you
has given way to a decent 'human' impulse, he has kicked himself later
for having been a fool?
"But ladies and gentlemen, your decision has already been made. Four
weeks from today you will know what has been decided for you. It is
neither reptile nor superman, neither back to the brutes nor on to the
gods. In the meantime--"
Certain light-witted members of the audience whose attention was
already wandering, noticed Doctor Brown hurriedly follow a page off the
platform and disappear behind the purple curtains. Joyously
anticipating that the she-reptile had bitten and killed one of her
keepers, they sat back, waiting for the chairman to reappear and
announce the welcome tragedy. They were disappointed. Within a minute
Brown was back, but on the floor of the auditorium. They saw him pluck
the ranting speaker by the sleeve. But they did not hear what the
Doctor whispered in De Soto's' ear.
"Come with me at once. Alice--"
They were in a taxi before the audience realized that it was deserted.
The second extras speculated on the significance of a scientific
meeting--especially one of this importance--being abandoned without
ceremony by speaker and chairman, but they drew no rational conclusions.
By noon the next day a verbatim account of that historic meeting, with
the word for word reproduction of De Soto's speech, was printed in
heavy type on the front page of every important newspaper or journal of
the civilized world.
De Soto's son was born an hour after the meeting broke up. An hour
later Alice was dead. Thirty minutes after Alice died, Brown reeled
into Crane's apartment.
"She is dead, thank God! It was born alive."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. It is not a mammal. It is still alive. De Soto has
it."
Chapter Thirteen--_HIS LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT_
Poor old Wilson had not prospered since his lodger deserted him. The
all but deaf, half blind old man had puttered about for months in his
inefficient endeavors to find a successor for the departed Bork, but
without any luck.
One morning, long after his needy friends had given up all hope that
old Wilson would ever again be on speaking terms with bacon and
prosperity, he ambled proudly over to his nearest neighbor's with the
glad tidings that the room was at last rented.
"Who to?" the gossip bawled in Wilson's better ear.
"Eh? I'm hard of hearing."
"Who did you rent the room to?"
"Durned if I know. Some fool. He paid in advance. Say, is that a
ten-dollar bill? My eyes ain't what they was."
Being assured that it was, old Wilson doddered off to the corner
grocery and purchased a whole side of bacon. For four weeks the
neighbors saw nothing of old Wilson or of his new lodger, although they
kept a sharp watch for the latter. Finally the theory that the new
lodger was a night worker, leaving the house after dark and returning
before dawn, was generally accepted. Substantially it was true. The
lodger left his room only between the hours of midnight and three in
the morning, to purchase at cheap lunch counters and liquor joints the
necessities of life. Not only was the shabby neighborhood totally
unprepared for the tragedy which suddenly burst upon it, but also the
whole world. At the end of the fourth week, when old Wilson began
fretting lest his invisible lodger overlook the vital matter of the
rent, the horror happened, without the slightest warning, at midnight
of the last day of the fourth week. Fifteen minutes after it happened
the tragedy was broadcast by telegraph, cable and radio to the farthest
corners of the civilized world. And it was broadcast barely in time to
save the human race from a similar fate.
The police were on the spot five minutes after the first inhuman scream
shattered the dog-tired silence of the mean neighborhood's midnight.
Even old Wilson heard that cry from hell. The siren of the police car
shrieking through the night was not more shrill. The officers battered
down the door of the lodger's room just as the last sounds of agony
expired in a dying groan. Entering with drawn revolvers, they stumbled
over a litter of empty bottles, dirty papers and fragments of
half-eaten meals. The man had died defending himself against terrible
odds. When they saw what had destroyed the victim, they froze where
they stood. One officer recovered his senses and raised his arm to
take aim. The captain knocked the automatic aside and the volley of
shots went wild.
"Don't shoot! Get the envelope in his hand."
At the risk of his life the officer darted forward, snatched the
envelope from the dead hand, and followed his shaking companion from
the room.
"Get all the furniture in the house and block up the doorway!" the
captain shouted.
While his men tumbled downstairs to fetch everything heavy that the
shack contained, the captain glanced at the letter. It was stamped and
addressed to Dr. Andrew Crane at the Erickson Foundation. Across the
envelope "Private and Personal" was scrawled in red ink.
"Get this man on the telephone and tell him to come here at once," the
captain ordered.
Crane was located at his own address. The officer repeated the street
and number. "Come at once."
"I'll be there in three minutes." Crane was as good as his promise.
"Bork's old place," he muttered as he gave his machine the gas and shot
into the street. "What now?"
He soon learned. The captain handed him the envelope and ordered him
to read it. The meat of the letter was on the first page. Crane read
it at a glance. Not bothering to look at the rest of the bulky
manuscript or to inquire what had brought the police to Bork's old
lodging, he stuffed the letter into his pocket and bolted for the
stairs.
"Come back!" the captain shouted.
"Can't. This must be broadcast at once."
"Halt!"
The front door slammed after Crane just as a bullet flattened itself on
the brass doorknob. He was roaring up the street before the second
shot overtook him, missed him by an inch, and shattered the windshield
of his low, open car. Shooting round a corner he put his pursuers
hopelessly out of the running. Four minutes later he was seated before
the broadcasting keyboard which the experts of the Erickson Foundation
had especially designed at De Soto's suggestion for a purpose totally
different from that for which Crane now used it.
Within half an hour his short, insistent message had girdled the globe.
Newspaper broadcasting stations in those countries where it was still
daylight or early evening took up the desperate message and drowned out
all programs and other unnecessary interference.
In the less sophisticated countries fire sirens shrieked through the
streets in the dead of night; criers followed them up, yelling to the
startled people to rise at once and destroy the plants, root and
branch, of the newly constructed stations of the Universal Power
Transmission Corporation. They needed no urging. De Soto's wild
speech four weeks previously had been translated into every living
language, popularized, and made accessible to the people of all
countries. The telephotographs of Bertha's brood were in every
newspaper office of the world two days after Wilkes had exhibited one
of the seventeen living monsters that were now world-famous. Crane's
selling campaign had been ably engineered for him before he ever sat
down at the Erickson keyboard. The human race, or at least the
civilized part of it, was already prepared for the hell about to burst
upon it, which one man, who might easily have been shot by a stupid
police officer, averted. Eight hours later the damage would have been
beyond human repair.
Instinct fought; civilization for the moment went under. From Senegal
to Capetown, from London to Leningrad, from Shanghai to Valparaiso,
from New York to San Francisco, and in every corrugated iron settlement
of the earth's wilderness, a sombre torch of destruction flared up
against the midnight skies or darkened the silver glare of the
age-weary, tolerant sun. The vast plants of the Universal Power
Transmission Company were destroyed the world over by flames and bombs
four hours after Crane broadcast the first call to arms. Universal and
all of its backers were ruined.
Thus far had the Erickson triumphed, but not in the way De Soto had
predicted. What of the counter-attack De Soto prepared for the
trustees? Crane destroyed that also. Before daybreak both the
Erickson and the Universal were a total loss.
To appreciate De Soto's motives, historians must take account of his
own tragedy. Brown would have delivered him from the worst at the last
moment--when it was too late. Alice should never have been permitted
to bear a son to the husband she loved. This Brown admitted--when the
son was born. There as a simple surgical trick, a quick snip of a pair
of scissors, which is permitted in such circumstances to even the most
conservative obstetrician. Brown would have used this, but the father
forbade.
"Will she live?" he asked, referring to Alice.
"Only a few hours, at most."
"Then I refuse to have this thing put out of the world. It is mine.
My first intention was right. So far as I am concerned, Alice is
already dead. This episode in my life is ended."
De Soto was not with his wife when she died. He had already fled the
house, taking with him his new-born son wrapped in a quilt.
For four weeks the world speculated on the fate of its greatest
inventor, Miguel De Soto. Gradually the theory was accepted that he
had destroyed himself in the sudden madness of grief when his beautiful
young wife died. Brown did this much for the principals in the tragedy
which he might have aborted; he signed a death certificate for the
mother and stated that the father had the child. Alice's remains were
cremated within thirty hours. Only Kent and the doctor witnessed the
last. Brown of course told the heartbroken father that Alice had died
naturally--as, indeed, she had. Nature, however, is hell.
The trustees of the Erickson Foundation mourned their brilliant
director for two days. Then, convinced like the rest that De Soto had
committed suicide, they reverently forgot him in a bronze tablet in the
president's office, inscribed to "Miguel De Soto, Benefactor of
Humanity and Founder of Our Fortunes." Finally, they decided not to
canonize their Aladdin for twenty-six days, until the second phrase of
their inscription would be an overwhelming fact.
As the days passed and no trace of De Soto was discovered by the
police, Crane and Wilkes agreed with Brown that the unhappy father had
indeed destroyed not only himself but also his offspring. Had he been
alive, they argued, he must certainly have given some sign before his
wife, whom he had loved, became an urnful of ashes. The three friends
attended to the immediate present, and let the future go for the
moment. De Soto's threat, that the world within four weeks would begin
to solve its greatest problem, might be only the defiant gesture of a
defeated maniac. They set about consolidating their definite
scientific gains, writing up the voluminous report on the protozoa,
giving the full history of Bertha and her reptilian brood, and finally
putting forth the bold hypothesis that all of these apparent miracles
were nothing more than the orderly progress of nature, hastened or
retarded several billionfold by the control of radiation in relation to
the germ cells of living animals.
Requests from every scientific center of the world for one of the
artificially evolved--or rather, developed, reptiles poured in by the
bushelful, and less presumptuous academies begged for at least one
microphotograph of the perfected protozoa. The latter were easily
satisfied. For months Wilkes had been preparing a new treatise, which
was now published and sold as fast as the presses could print it. The
more convincing proof, the seventeen living reptiles and their pickled
baby brother, were started on a world tour two days after Alice died
and De Soto disappeared. It is well that they did, for when it became
necessary to destroy billions of dollars' worth of property, the public
of at least one continent was thoroughly educated visually--and the
world at large had seen hundreds of photographs of its grandparents.
The word was educated in one detail. When Crane began broadcasting the
warning that unless the people of all countries at once destroyed the
plants of the Universal Power Transmission Company, their own
_children_, not possibly their great, great grandchildren, would be
very similar to those reptilian grandparents now touring the civilized
world, the warning struck home at once. Half an hour of wireless
transmissions by means of the new devices, Crane asserted, would
suffice to change the germ cells of every living human being
permanently. Thirty minutes, no more, he declared from the Erickson
keyboard, would hurl every child born of parents then living back to
the reptiles. Mothers would bear, not snakes, but things with legs and
gigantic heads like those which the hen brought forth. These, however,
unlike the hen's, would be born alive and not from the egg. At one
stride the race would retrogress hundreds of millions of years to its
premammalian ancestors. This, it was broadcast, would be the
inevitable outcome of the first use of the new "Universal" system for
the wireless transmission of electrical energy. The unborn would be
born reptiles; the fruit of every union not yet consummated, for as
long as the present generation lived, would be a race of carnivorous
reptiles, possibly venomous.
The preservation of the species is a deeper instinct, even with the
individual, than is the preservation of self. Bertha's fellow hens
pecked her to death when their instincts taught them that she had
betrayed the birds to the reptiles. Likewise when Crane, desperately
transmitting De Soto's unintended warning from the Erickson
broadcasting keyboards, spelled out the impending degeneration of the
human race, instinct prevailed. Machine guns, gas and tear bombs,
flame-projectors and human militia melted like smoke before a
hurricane, when a race about to be outraged surged over the merely
human defenses created by unlimited wealth. In four hours Universal
was wiped out; the race was saved.
For seven hours the night and early morning had been turned into
clanging day. Extra after extra headlined the progress of the world
riots to excited householders as Universal's gigantic plants went their
predestined way by bombs and flames. One shrewd go-getter after
another hugged himself in the chilly dawn. These keen men of affairs
had backed De Soto and the Erickson. Their money was safe. Had the
Erickson been bombed? Not on your life? Were its trustees panicky?
Again, not on your life. They knew what they were talking about when
they cautiously released a "preliminary announcement" two days before
the present fiasco of Universal. The canny trustees had presaged the
collapse of the Universal. They themselves, they hinted, would
broadcast the story of an invention which would scrap Universal in half
an hour. Was this the prophesied revelation?
It was not. For two hours the perspiring president of the Erickson had
been trying to distract Crane's attention. Crane stuck to his job,
methodically transmitting the whole of De Soto's last will and
testament. Universal was already destroyed; what Crane now did was a
labor of hate. He broadcast the truth as De Soto's twisted, infinitely
clear mind had conceived it, in the vain hope that common sense might
at last prevail. He was deceived.
Unable to restrain himself any longer, the president roughly brushed
Crane's hands off the keyboard.
"What do you think you are doing?" he demanded, red in the face, the
veins on his neck and temples swollen to the bursting point.
"Putting a crimp in you, if you want to know," Crane grinned.
Appeals to gratitude for past benefits received, threats of arrest,
promises of any reasonable sum up to fifty million, tears--almost all
of these were offered and rejected in the brief space of ten minutes
while Crane rested and the president wallowed.
"The man was crazy," the president all but sobbed as his final
argument. "You know as well as I do that he had been out of his head
for months. We've bluffed off the Universal. The world is ours.
Fifty million if you stop broadcasting. You shan't--"
"Steady!" Crane ordered. "Hinder me now and I'll--. Sit down! Wait
there till I'm through." He reached for a heavy steel spanner which
some careless workman had left near the keyboard. "They can hang me if
they like, but I'll smash your skull like an egg with this if you
interfere."
As De Soto's last will and testament filtered into space, the whole
purpose of his insane life became brutally evident and coldly clear.
According to his own account he had fully intended helping the race a
hundred million years in its struggle toward perfection, when he first
realized his own incomparable powers.
Then, as the strange decay which was ultimately to undo him began to
steal through his cells, he foresaw the futility of any help; for in
the end the whole race must perish or be mutated into another, not
human. Why strive for its perfection? What are a billion years in the
life of the universe, where galaxies measure their moments by the pulse
beats that are the birth and the lingering extinction of a noble race,
like that of the kingly reptiles? On such a scale the chronology of
the mammals, and their puny human offshoot, are less than the tenth of
a second. The reptiles vanished, leaving only the comparatively
indestructible accidents of their bony frames in the hardened sands;
the mammals must follow their predecessors into oblivion; the very
stars of heaven crumble to dust or dissipate in futile heat, and the
records of all life's struggle must in the end be smoothed out in
eternal cold. Why strive? To what end? Only an idiot would say "for
the greater glory of the human mind." The reptile mind forgot its
glory before the first mammal gave milk to its feeble young.
Pessimism, black, irrefutable, and absolute, seems to have been De
Soto's creed at this transient stage of his own evolution. The next
stage--induced, as he declared, by a blunder on his own part, which
initiated the degeneration of his clear seeing mind--began when an
accident in his laboratory started his descent. At first his purpose
was clear and rational. A race that must perish, or at best lose its
individuality beyond all hope of past memory, was not worth any
rational being's effort toward perfection. The longer it struggled to
attain the unattainable, the longer would be its agony of frustration.
Therefore, in mercy, it should be destroyed. This was De Soto's first
purpose before he degenerated.
He was not brutal; destruction should come in thirty years, swiftly,
painlessly, mercifully, like the dawn. How? By universal
sterilization of the human race. The physical means were simple; he
had grasped them in the first hour of his study after leaving the
library. Not X-rays, but shorter radiations, capable of affecting the
most intimately complex cells of the human body, could easily be
broadcast over the entire earth in a short morning. He would save
humanity from itself by wiping it out, painlessly, in an hour.
Scientists would speculate for thirty years on the cause of the
universal sterility. Their speculations would end in death, complete,
quiet and peaceful for the whole human race; and no last handful of
sages, hundreds of millions of years hence, would be condemned to see
their dwindling star die and their leprous planet freeze.
Sterilization, complete and universal for the race of men--that was the
one sane answer to the riddle of the ages. When he joined the Erickson
Foundation, this great dream was De Soto's purpose.
To accomplish it, he declared in his will, he needed technical
assistance--broadcasting stations over the whole world. These he could
not command without financial aid. Seeing that assistance, he met with
his first doubt and his first check. Was he wrong after all? Is there
something in mankind of a different order from anything that the
splendid, perfect, all-conquering reptiles possessed? There was. Man,
he learned to his astonishment, had a soul. Who knows, he sneered in
his last will and testament, but that the carnivorous reptiles, who had
two more or less centered nervous systems, had not a pair of souls?
The human soul, De Soto declared in his will, shows itself in art.
To his perfectly adjusted nervous system, all human art appeared as a
blundering attempt to harmonize what cannot be harmonized, and to seek
proportion where none is possible. A certain restaurant inspired him
to these reflections, and later, a cook and waiter induced him to apply
similar principles to the human body and to its concomitant, the human
mind. The soul of man, if it exists, is, he concluded, an abortion
that should be chloroformed at birth. The reptiles, he asserted, had a
better substitute.
De Soto was scientific. Although he scoffed at the existence of a
human soul, he decided to experiment before declaring that it did not
exist. Should such a thing be found, he would throw his unbounded
talent aside and aid the race to develop this mysterious spark into a
flame that would consume the universe. His will here becomes somewhat
incoherent. In substance he seems to be saying that he offered mankind
the stars and it asked for a better radio. Some who heard Crane's
broadcasting of the original, interpret the obscure passage as meaning
that De Soto offered all men everlasting oblivion, and they demanded
eternal life.
About this time, he asserts, he wavered. Might it not be possible,
after all, to breed a race that would see nature eye to eye? How
decide? Experiment answers all. He experimented, blundered, proved
himself to be a human fool like all his kind, fell in love with his
wife, tried to undo his blunder, failed, and, like the fool he admitted
he was, doomed the whole race to follow in his own footsteps. He had
hoped to show to all mankind, in his own son, an example of the
transcendent genius that human nature, aided by human skill, may
produce.
While experimenting he blundered--humanly, irrevocably. He grew to
love his wife and longed for her death. Like the degenerated wretch he
was, he could not kill her. He had failed. Was there still hope for
the race? On a last appeal to the men whom he had made rich, he tried
to make them see as he saw. The Universal, broadcasting its only
half-understood wireless transmission of power, would avenge his own
misfortune.
He knew that no living physicist or engineer could penetrate the subtle
complexity of his mechanism. The best of them would see in it only a
marvelously ingenious device for transmitting electrical energy without
wires and without costly power stations. None would analyze the
inevitable consequences of the profitable transmission, for none had
the inventor's all but superhuman genius. They could not calculate, as
he did, from the subtle equations, the accompanying radiations that
would spray the chromosomes of every human being with hard radiation.
Before the keenest living physicist or biologist could suspect the
danger, the damage would be done, and the whole race, profoundly
changed in its most intimate germ cells, would be irrevocably reversed
toward its reptilian ancestors. Like an explosion, the whole course of
human, mammalian and later reptilian evolution would be undone in a
single generation.
De Soto was not without mercy. Feeling that many might have at least
the beginnings of a soul in their minds, he provided for them. An
entire generation must bring forth only reptiles. This he had already
ordained, in putting into Williams' hands the dangerous key to a
financial fool's paradise. The wireless transmission of _electrical_
energy, and with it the instantaneous pulse of _dysgenic_ energy,
degrading the unborn offspring of all then living to the outward shape
and the inner bi-souled status of prehistoric reptiles, was a
certainty. Williams and his crowd, human as fish, had swallowed hook,
bait and sinker. They, not De Soto, should have the honor of hurling
humanity backwards hundreds of millions of years in one generation. So
much for justice; mercy must be heard. De Soto's mercy was this, and
it was adequate.
According to his last will, he baited Williams with the wireless
transmission of _electrical_ energy, and this is a fact. The
counterblast with which he planned to destroy Williams was not
electrical. At one stride De Soto put electrical energy forever on the
shelf. It became as obsolete as the fly-coach--or it would have so
become, had not Crane threatened the president with that hefty steel
spanner. Atomic energy was the bait dangled by De Soto before the
trustees' bulging eyes. At will he could pass up or down the atomic
scale, transmuting any element into any other, as a skilled harmonist
modulates his compositions, and in the passage from one element to its
neighbors he released and controlled hells of energy that made the
lightnings of heaven or the millions of volts dispensed by Universal as
obsolete as the thin, steam whistle of a peanut stand. Many had
released atomic energy; none had controlled it. De Soto did both, and
he gave the great secret into the hands of the Erickson trustees as a
free gift. They grasped it greedily. The moment Universal began
marketing, the Erickson was to broadcast the full account of its own
wireless "power"--controlled atomic energy--which would forever banish
electricity and all its devices, as steam and gasoline had banished the
plodding horse.
Included in that hard scale of cosmic rays, with which De Soto tempted
and won the Erickson trustees, was another, a high harmonic of the
first, tuned to disintegrate the procreative germ cells of all living
things--plant, protozoon, animal, man. Thus would he show mercy.
Universal's product would be on the air before the Erickson replied.
For one generation the females of the human race would bring forth
their reptilian young alive. Then, forever, the pulse of cosmic rays,
generated from the disintegration of matter--universal matter, the
stuff of which galaxies are made--disintegrated to swell the bellies of
half a dozen human beings, would sterilize human and reptile alike.
"Curtain," De Soto adds in his manuscript, "Humanity; Reptiles;
Sterilization. The Great Comedy: Reptiles, Humanity, Extinction."
De Soto was not redeemed. He died as he lived. The letter which Crane
broadcast was his last, futile gesture of triumph. The world was his,
he said; the letter would lead the world through the hell it deserved
for at least thirty years.
"You can broadcast this," the letter concluded, "as soon as you receive
it, for then the Universal will have generated its reptiles in the
bodies of your young women and in the cells of your young men. Nothing
can ever again start evolution forward. We are reptiles, and as
reptiles we shall live, propagate, and die, unless you accept my mercy.
The Foundation which has taught me all that I know of humanity as it
now is, may save at least the gray hairs of those now living from utter
disgrace. Lest those whom I have served see their grandchildren--not
merely their children--snapping at their prey, with reptilian bodies, I
prescribe and offer you the solace of extinction. This, as I saw
clearly at first, is the one hope of the human race. Use my device for
the generation and transmission of atomic energy, and within a century
the human race will have perished. For your offspring now will be
reptiles; thereafter you and they will be sterilized--if you use my
device. It will give you world supremacy in finance for as long as the
human race endures.
"I mail you this when it is too late to avert the disaster which
Universal will precipitate tomorrow. May the whole race taste the
bitterness which I have drained. Once I had a vision, I blundered, I
loved. I blundered again and again. I had a vision only to blunder
irrevocably. The one that I loved is dead--dead as the whole futile
human race will some day be, and she has left me a son, the sum and
substance of all my blunders. Like you that I despised and would once
have helped, I am a failure, undone by my own humanity. I cannot hate
you, for you are reptiles, even as I am. Your intellect, like mine, at
its best, is no better than the blundering instincts of a thing that
perished before the first of our kind was conceived. Why prolong the
farce? For thirty years you will see yourselves as you were, are, and
shall be. Then the curtain will drop forever on this silly interlude
of eternity. You will find my body with my son's. His mother would
love neither of us, could she see us now. 'As I am, you shall be.'"
"I guess you're wrecked too," Crane remarked to the president as he
finished broadcasting De Soto's testament. "We all are. Shut up! Get
out."
The president left hurriedly, and Crane called up the doctor.
"Come round to Bork's place with me, will you? I haven't the nerve to
go alone."
Fifteen minutes later they were cautiously admitted by the police.
Crane was now respectable--the extras had restored his good name. The
captain volunteered to lead an expedition into the barricaded den.
"Let me go first," he advised. "It has been moving about and whistling
birdlike for the last two hours."
The barricade was cautiously removed. Not a sound issued from the
room. The living thing within had taken its brainless revenge on the
author of its unnatural life. With steady hand the captain aimed for
the reptile's rudimentary upper brain and pulled the trigger. Three
short convulsive jerks, and the monstrous son expired in shambles which
had been his father.
--THE END--
[End of Seeds of Life, by John Taine]